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Two University of California at Berkeley graduates who have been detained in Iran on espionage charges for more than two years were finally released today, according to their families.

Shane Bauer and Josh Fattal, both 29, and a third UC Berkeley graduate, Sarah Shourd, were arrested on July 31, 2009, after embarking on a hike in Iraq's Kurdistan region near the Iranian border.

Iran accused all three of them of espionage and last month Bauer and Fattal were sentenced to eight years in prison.

But the hikers and their families said they aren't spies but instead were detained after they accidentally crossed an unmarked border into Iran.

Iran released Shourd, 32, who is engaged to Bauer, last September because she was in poor health. Shourd announced in May that she would not return to Iran for a trial because she is suffering from depression and post-traumatic stress disorder.

Shourd and family members of Bauer and Fattal greeted the two men in Muscat, Oman, when they arrived there after being released and flown out of Iran, according to a statement issued by the three families.

The families said, "Today can only be described as the best day of our lives. We have waited for nearly 26 months for this moment and the joy and relief we feel at Shane and Josh's long-awaited freedom knows no bounds."

They said, "We now all want nothing more than to wrap Shane and Josh in our arms, catch up on two lost years and make a new beginning, for them and for all of us."

The families thanked the Sultan of Oman, Qaboos bin Said Al Said of Oman and his envoy Dr. Salem Al Ismaily, for their roles in securing the release of Bauer and Fattal.

They also thanked the hikers' lawyer, Masoud Shafii, and the Swiss Ambassador to Iran, Livia Leu Agosti. The Swiss Embassy in Iran acted as a liaison between the U.S. and Iran because the two countries don't have diplomatic relations.

U.S. Senator Barbara Boxer, D-Calif., said in a statement, "It is so wonderful that Shane and Josh are finally coming home to be reunited with their loved ones. But I deeply regret that their release has taken so long. Shane and Josh have been forced to pay too great a price by the Iranian government."

The Council on American-Islamic Relations, a Muslim advocacy group, issued a statement today welcoming the release of the pair but said the U.S. government should now "address the issue of Iranian citizens detained in the U.S. with the same spirit of compassion that resulted in the release of Shane Bauer and Josh Fattal."

Iran's official Press TV has reported that two U.S. hikers who have been detained in Iran since 2009 were released early this morning.

The two University of California at Berkeley graduates who have been detained in Iran on espionage charges for more than two years were reportedly released around 4:30 a.m. PST.

The state TV's website said in a statement released by Iran's Judiciary, an appeals court agreed to reduce the detention sentences of Shane Bauer and Josh Fattal, both 29, and release them on $500,000 bail each.

Bauer, Fattal, and a third UC Berkeley graduate, Sarah Shourd, were arrested on July 31, 2009, after embarking on a hike in Iraq's Kurdistan region near the Iranian border.

Iran has accused them of espionage, but the hikers and their families say they aren't spies but instead were detained after they accidentally crossed an unmarked border into Iran.

Iran released Shourd, 32, who is engaged to Bauer, last September because she was in poor health.

The Swiss Embassy represents U.S. interests in Iran and has been acting as an intermediary, according to U.S. State Department officials.

In another step to privatize Berkeley's 75 occupied public housing town-homes, billionaire Stephen M. Ross, CEO and founder of The Related Companies, and 95% owner of the Miami Dolphins, is in talks with the Berkeley Housing Authority (BHA) to buy Berkeley's occupied public housing units, through one of his companies.

The BHA has entered into an exclusive negotiating rights agreement with billionaire Ross and his company known as The Related Companies of California, LLC, after the BHA's joint finance and feasibility subcommittee recommended that his company should be chosen to buy Berkeley's 75 public housing units. As of September 8, currently 66 units of the 75 units of Berkeley's public housing are still occupied.

According to Forbes as of March 2011, 69-70 year old Stephen M. Ross is worth around $3.4 billion, and has made his fortune in real estate, is married with 4 children, and has lost around $1.6 billion in net worth during the past few years because of the crumbling real estate market. Ross resides in luxury at 956 5th Ave., in New York City.

As recent as September 8, Tia Ingram, Executive Director of the BHA, directed the members of the Berkeley Housing Authority Board to approve the recommendations to authorize the Executive Director to enter into an exclusive negotiating rights agreement (ENRA) with The Related Companies of California, LLC, for the transfer of Berkeley's 75 public housing units to the company owned by the billionaire, Stephen M. Ross.

BHA's Ingram, wants the ENRA to last a period of 90 days, with the possibility of a 30 day extension, to negotiate the terms of the Disposition and Development Agreement to transfer the 75 public housing units, and to designate the BHA's joint Finance/Feasibility Subcommittee as the lead to work with BHA staff during the negotiations.

If billionaire Ross and The Related Companies gets their hands on Berkeley's public housing units, the city of Berkeley may end up subsidizing the billionaire and his company out of the city's Housing Trust Fund in the effort to renovate and rehabilitate the public housing units, but the majority of funds needed to renovate the buildings will have to be raised by the Related company.

When asked if the BHA has another developer interested in buying Berkeley's public housing units if the negotiations breakdown, BHA's Project Manager, Kathleen Sims said, "The BHA is in negotiation with The Related Companies of California, and until those negotiations are over I cannot say more about the next step the BHA will pursue with it's public housing units if the negotiations fail. I think that finding someone to renovate and maintain the public housing units as HUD has ordered, is a good thing for Berkeley."

Berkeley has long been known as a bastion of liberal causes and the progressive movement, and it is obscene gesture to many in the community that Berkeley's public housing units may end up in the hands of a billionaire and his for-profit corporation, and that the billionaire and his company may be subsidized with funds from the city's Housing Trust Fund.

Former Berkeley Rent Board Commissioner, Eleanor Walden said, "The BHA has now fallen into lockstep with people like Dick Cheney and Haliburton, if this contract is not transparent or competitive. I am appalled at the record of the BHA during the past few years which has contributed to the erosion of public housing."

Though established during 1966, in recent years the BHA has spent numerous years listed as a Troubled agency. The BHA owns and manages 75 public housing units, administers around 1,939 subsidized housing Section 8 voucher contracts, and filed papers with the Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) on Dec. 29, 2009, to dispose of it's public housing units. The approval by HUD to dispose of and sell Berkeley's 75 public housing units occurred on Dec. 22, 2010.

As recent as May 2, 2011, the BHA released a Request For Proposals (RFP), in an effort to find one or more so-called nonprofit housing developers, or for-profit developers willing to buy Berkeley's mostly occupied 75 - three and four bedroom townhouse units, located throughout the City of Berkeley, on 15 parcels.

Four hundred workers at the Bayer Pharmaceutical plant in Berkeley, California are asking the company to honor promises made two years ago when executives accepted taxpayer subsidies in exchange for providing good-paying jobs.

Workers have been talking with the company since July 25, 2011, seeking guarantees that the company won’t get rid of good-paying jobs after getting a taxpayer bailout. Community concerns increased this spring when Bayer announced it was closing a nearby plant in Emeryville because they were outsourcing 400 jobs to a lower-cost facility overseas.

“It’s wrong for companies to take subsidies, promise good jobs to the community, then outsource those jobs after they’ve taken so much from taxpayers,” said Donal Mahon, a former Bayer veteran employee who is now helping workers negotiate a contract to protect good jobs and secure safer staffing levels at the Berkeley plant.

Bayer reported profits of nearly $2 billion dollars last year, based in part on $1.35 billion in sales of the drug Kogenate which is manufactured in Berkeley.

“It just seems like Bayer and so many other companies are trying to take advantage of workers and communities during the recession,” said Mahon. “We’re trying to hold them accountable on behalf of everyone in the community who depends on good jobs in this area.”

If Bayer refuses to offer any job protection, workers will evaluate a range of options aimed at encouraging the company to be more accountable to the community.

Elizabeth Sklut and Trish Hawthorne, co-coordinators of the urn restoration project, led the dedication ceremony.

Steven Finacom

An array of participants lined up in front of the urn to receive thanks for their contributions. They included, left to right, contractor Jim Duval, architect Alesia Connelly, Sklut, contractor Michael McCutcheon, Hawthorne, designer Michael Casey, and sculptor Sarita Camille Waite.

Steven Finacom

The one original surviving urn stands at the base of Indian Trail where it intersects The Alameda.

Steven Finacom

A metal plaque, displaying a brief history of the neighborhood and an early photograph of the urns, was installed as part of the dedication and stands across from the first replica urn.

Steven Finacom

A brightly attired crowd gathered for the September 10 ceremony in Great Stoneface Park.

The first two replica historic urns to grace the Thousand Oaks subdivision were dedicated before an appreciative crowd in Berkeley’s Great Stoneface Park on Saturday, September 10, 2011.

“This has been long in the making,” said project co-coordinator Elizabeth Sklut, standing next to Trish Hawthorne, her collaborator. “Trish and I began the project in two-hundred…” Sklut said, to considerable laughter, before correcting herself with a smile, to “two thousand and three. And frankly, we were skeptical about its success.”

“It has sometimes seemed to Elizabeth and me that the project has taken a century to complete”, added Hawthorne, the historian of the neighborhood.

“It’s rare on the occasion of a 100th birthday to be able to do more than offer congratulations”, Hawthorne said. “Restoring a youthful feature is usually not an option. Our neighborhood’s centennial, however, provided the opportunity to recreate some long lost features—the new urns we celebrate today.”

The measure of success stood behind the two, a massive ornamental urn on a stepped concrete pedestal downhill from one of the iconic boulders of Thousand Oaks in the half-acre park. The second replica urn stands a block away at the intersection of Yosemite Road and The Alameda.

More than twenty urns originally graced the neighborhood. “The masses of trees and flowers planted in the parkings, the placement of monumental cement urns on every corner, and the additional of ornamental benches, all contributed to civic beauty”, Hawthorne wrote in a Berkeley Architectural Heritage Association brochure for a tour of the neighborhood several years ago.

“The era was a progressive one, and one way to progress toward a better life in the public arena was through beautification of public areas.”

Mark Daniels, the landscape designer employed by developer John Spring to lay out the neighborhood a century ago, curved the streets to fit the natural topography, and preserved the picturesque boulders and rock outcroppings in small public parks and the gardens of the newly built houses, including his own, just a stone’s toss from the urn dedication site.

Views framed the iconic urns on many corners and street edges in the district, combining with the rocks and gnarled live oaks to make the neighborhood look like a scene from a painting by Maxfield Parrish. New houses were constructed, filling in the vacant lots, for about a quarter century.

Over the years the original urns were damaged, weathered, and ultimately removed, until there was only one left on the corner of Indian Trail and The Alameda.

Sklut and Hawthorne credited a $7,200 grant from the UC Berkeley Chancellor’s Community Partnership Fund with helping to jumpstart the effort to recreate the urns a few years ago. They also thanked UC campus landscape architect Jim Horner for partnering with the project. “This project would never have happened without Jim’s involvement”, Hawthorne said. “He was with us every step of the way.”

Beyond the UC grant “our fundraising was done solely through the Thousand Oaks Association Newsletter”, Sklut said. Each issue carried an update on the urn project, and “we have received more than 170 checks, large and small, from every street and several businesses on Solano.”

The co-coordinators ran through a long list of supporters of the project, including City of Berkeley staff. “We really benefitted from the City people who helped us generously and graciously with whatever we asked”, Sklut said, crediting Diane Aikenhead of the Department of Public Works in particular for helping to get project approvals.

Councilmember Laurie Capitelli arranged a fee waiver for the urns, Sklut said, and Professor Kurt Cuffey and scholar Gray Brechin of the Department of Geography at UC Berkeley were also partners in the Chancellor’s Grant process.

A number of members of the project team were invited to stand in front of the urn to receive crowd applause. They included Sarita Camille Waite, the sculptor who designed the replica urns—as well as the bear cubs at the reconstructed fountain at The Circle on Marin Avenue—contractors Michael McCutcheon and Jim Duvall who had fabricated and installed the replicas, and designer Michael Casey.

The Berkeley Historical Plaque Project arranged the fabrication of a pedestal plaque on the history of Thousand Oaks that was installed the same week and unveiled across a path from the Great Stoneface Park urn. The Berkeley Path Wanderers and City parks staff cleaned the area in preparation for the installation and dedication.

Hawthorne said that when the urns were lifted into place on August 30, “it was amazing to see the reaction immediately…people with smiles” passing by.

“The designers of the urns knew the lasting power of creating something beautiful for all to enjoy”, she added. “Such things create a community identity, a sense of place, and refresh our spirits.”

“A century later, we respond to the urns as our earlier neighbors must have done– with pleasure and the recognition that this is right. Such experiences make us feel connected to one another and stretch us to be our best selves.”

“We thank the creators of the urns for their vision, and we thank all of you for your help in reaffirming that vision 100 years later”, Hawthorne concluded. “Now we can once again enjoy more of these handsome works of civic art.”

“Please take pride in our neighborhood, and the spirit of Thousand Oaks,” Sklut added.

“We officially dedicate these new urns to the City of Berkeley, in the spirit of those who saw Berkeley as the Athens of the West and built for the generations to come”, said Hawthorne.

Jill Martinucci, representing Councilmember Capitelli, and Pam Gray, the current chair of the Parks and Recreation Commission, formally accepted the urns.

“I want to personally thank Elizabeth and Trish who have shown tremendous vision, grace and, in this town, tenacity in all kinds of challenges to see this through. Thank you so much!” Martinucci said.

‘There’s a very small handful of things that we as Berkeleyites can actually agree on, is that we have a real shared love of our parks”, said Pam Gray. “What a gift it has been to have this donation…of these beautiful pieces of civic art.”

The crowd numbered a hundred or more. After the re-dedication ceremony most adjourned to the nearby Mark Daniels home where owner John Harris had lent the garden for a celebration party.

Cookies in the shape of urns had been prepared by “neighborhood bakers” Sklut said, and were quickly consumed along with lemonade and wine, as visitors perused a display on Thousand Oaks and Mark Daniels put together by Harris.

(Steven Finacom is a founding member of the Berkeley Historical Plaque Project.)

Opinion

Editorials

The eternal paradox about what is commonly called journalism is why so many people who commit it manage not to see what’s going on before their eyes, even as a reasonable number of others, in and out of journalism, do.

Ever wonder about what’s happening in the global economy? Well, here it is, a summary which could fit on the back of an envelope, and it’s even perversely funny:

“Quarterly GDP data don’t, on the whole, tend to make the person studying them laugh out loud. The most recent set, however, are an exception, despite the fact that the general picture is of unrelieved and spreading economic gloom. Instead of the surge of rebounding growth which historically accompanies successful exit from a recession, we have the UK’s disappointing 0.2 per cent growth, the US’s anaemic 0.3 per cent and the glum eurozone average figure of 0.2 per cent. That number includes the surprising and alarming German 0.1 per cent, the desperately poor French 0 per cent and then, wait for it, the agreeably frisky Belgian 0.7 per cent. Why is that, if you’ve been following the story, laugh-aloud funny? Because Belgium doesn’t have a government. Thanks to political stalemate in Brussels, it hasn’t had one for 15 months. No government means none of the stuff all the other governments are doing: no cuts and no ‘austerity’ packages. In the absence of anyone with a mandate to slash and burn, Belgian public sector spending is puttering along much as it always was; hence the continuing growth of their economy. It turns out that from the economic point of view, in the current crisis, no government is better than any government – any existing government.”

That paragraph alone is worth column inch after column inch of sententious pieces in the American press attempting to convey what the hell the U.S. Congress is up to—yes, even in the New York Times, most of whose staffers appear not to read what Professor Paul Krugman writes on their own op-ed page. We’d be better off without this current Congress, wouldn’t we, so why not just say so? This is not an endorsement, by the way, of the Tea Party anti-government ideology, just a glum statement of observable fact.

And why, why, was it so hard for the muckety mucks in American journalism to see that the invasion of Iraq was insane? Here’s how Bill Keller, New York Times one-time executive editor and sometime columnist, phrased the question in his recent embarrassing apologia in the Times Sunday magazine:

“The question is really two questions: Knowing what we know now, with the glorious advantage of hindsight, was it a mistake to invade and occupy Iraq? And knowing what we knew then, were we wrong to support the war?”

The answer to the first question is so obvious it’s not worth discussing, but so is the answer to the second one. It’s Yes, in both cases. Or as my grandchildren might say rudely, No Duh!

My friend Ruth Rosen noted recently in these pages that Keller confessed in his piece that supporters of the invasion were “exclusively a boys' club…a little drugged by testosterone.” But I think that’s a little facile. For one thing, there’s Judith Miller, she of the non-existent Weapons of Mass Destruction.

For another, when my whole extended family of 10 or so including babes in arms marched down Market Street on a bright spring day in a vain effort to derail the invasion, the male members of the family (including one ex-NYT reporter) were right there, as were many other male friends. Blaming stupidity on gender, tempting though it is, isn’t enough.

What I’d really like to know is why most of the conventional press (what we used to call derisively the “newsies” when I was managing political campaigns in the 60s and 70s) is so often the last to get the news. Why did we in the Bay Area see clearly from Day 1 how badly the Iraq boondoggle would turn out, and they didn’t? This kind of question frequently occupied my mind during the ten or so years when my associates and I in Ann Arbor tried to convey the problems with that era’s war, the one in Vietnam.

The myth of press objectivity, which first surfaced in the 1920s as a ploy to lure advertisers, has largely gone by the wayside as the Internet age has added many new voices to the process of telling stories. These voices don’t have the purported authority of the magisterial newspaper, but often they reveal information that the conventional press just doesn’t have.

All of this has been in my mind for the past year as we’ve been working on the transition from relatively conventional periodic print publication to whatever it is that we’ve got now. One thing that’s become abundantly clear is that opinionated pieces, particularly those buttressed with a few externally verifiable facts, are much more informative than “impartial” reporting, especially in the local context.

After living in Berkeley for such a long time, I pretty much know what’s going on, and if I miss something someone is sure to volunteer to fill me in on the many back stories which lurk around the borders of normal news.

Here’s an example of the kind of back story which might be missed: the new apartment building now under construction on the southeast corner of Ashby and Telegraph was featured on the Berkeleyside website not long ago. The plain-vanilla story, devoid of attitude, prompted many reader comments, 75 and counting, many outraged that the city had granted numerous variances for the project, but no real explanation of why this might be.

A recent comment:

“a Parking lot entrance/exit ON ASHBY, JUST ABOVE TELEGRAPH ??? Somebody got away with some kind of hogwash to push that through... and I'm somebody who supports much of this sort of development... THAT particular bit of POOR DESIGN will cost us all dearly- accidents, horns, aggravation, etc...NO DOUBT ABOUT IT... wow.”

My own preference is for more formal discourse, but this reader has a point, and it’s a public benefit to provide him with a forum to make it in, particularly since I’m not volunteering to do it myself.

And that back story I mentioned? It surfaced in none of the 75 comments that I could determine. The attorney for the project developer, not mentioned in story or comments, is City of Berkeley Planning Commission Chair Harry Pollack. Some of the “hogwash” might be connected to that factoid. Or not.

Another relevant factoid about another story did surface in reader response to another Berkeleyside story: Berkeley’s staff Transportation Manager is also the mayor of Albany, setting the stage for who knows what kind of conflict of interest. Does it matter? Maybe.

After a generation of almost no coverage of Berkeley news by the conventional media, we are now blessed with several respectable sources of information. Berkeleyside is a commercial site which aims to be more than just a blog, though it uses blog software. Readers often add useful information to staff stories. Articles are heavy on lifestyle content and short on analysis, but frequently interesting. The proprietors have “partnered” with many bigger enterprises in the style pioneered by high-tech corporations, so their content might pop up anywhere, including the Chronicle, the online Bay Citizen and even the New York Times.

(The Bay Citizen, launched with money from Warren Hellman and some of his rich friends, might be hard up for cash these days, since their staffers or perhaps interns have recently been seen asking for contributions at the Berkeley Farmers’ Market.)

The Bay Area News Group empire has often assigned a reporter to Berkeley stories, but BANG is now in the process of re-organizing its outlets (and laying off news staff). It’s not clear where these stories will be found on a regular basis, but they’re pretty decent if you can find them.

And Berkeley now has a Patch, a local online outpost of the far-flung Huffington Post/AOL conglomerate. It’s capable of doing useful pieces too: see today’s log (puzzlingly in reverse chronological order) of a Berkeley City Council meeting called to deal with Safeway’s plans to build a megabox on the corner of College and Claremont. Just be careful you don’t get the Berkeley New Jersey Patch by mistake—there are little Patches everywhere.

Even the Chronicle occasionally has a good Berkeley piece, often of course lifted from local outlets. The cleaned-up East Bay Express has also been doing the occasional Berkeley story.

All this brouhaha about little Berkeley has suggested to me that with just the two of us holding down the fort here we don’t need to work quite so hard these days. Our main goal has always been to let Berkeleyans know what’s coming down before it lands on them, and it still is, so we appreciate the help from our colleagues at other publications. Another clichéd mission statement is “to print the news and raise hell”, and with help of others on the first part of that slogan we feel freer to concentrate on the second part.

Because of our financial woes almost all of our stories are written by volunteers who share our goal of supporting the people’s right to know what’s going on. They have opinions on most of the topics they cover, and they’re free to include them as long as opinion is clearly identified as such. We also appreciate the increasing number of strictly opinion pieces we’ve been getting. Often they are structured as comments on news found elsewhere, which is fine as long as links to the original sources are offered.

This week I’ve shifted gears to better reflect the kind of contributions we’ve been getting. My options are limited by the software I’ve inherited, but I’ve changed what I can. Instead of doing a big Wednesday roundup issue, I’ve posted whatever’s in hand as soon as it comes in, on a daily basis with a new issue date just about every day.

This means that you should really go to berkeleydailyplanet.com every day if you can. Some days there might be just one story, on others several. If you miss these daily issues you can always find them by clicking back with the “Previous Issue” button on the upper left side of the site—as far back as you want, to see what has gone before.

I hope this schedule will be better for the many readers who have complained that the big issues require too much scrolling down the page, and that they often don’t get to the bottom. I hope it will be easier for me, too. I’m not getting any younger.

One more thing: for technical reasons I can’t add comments after each story, and I’m not sure that’s a good idea anyhow, judging by the garbage that appears on the Chronicle’s sfgate.com. But please do let us know what you think by writing, as always, to opinion@berkeleydailyplanet.com

The Editor's Back Fence

If you haven't looked at berkeleydailyplanet.com for a few days, you might be surprised to find that for the past week we've been launching a new "issue" almost daily, on an irregular basis as copy is submitted. One benefit of this plan is that you can read our sometimes lengthy, sometimes challenging pieces thoroughly on the day we put them online. Several readers have told us that the long, long Wednesday issues can be too much of a good thing, so that they never get around to reading everything.

As always, you can read previous issues, including the several which have appeared this week, by clicking backwards using the "Previous Issue" button on the top left side of the page.

Here are some easy links to get to this week’s issues, if you haven't yet tried the "previous" button.:

And as you read these pieces, you should always be aware that comments long and short can be submitted to opinion@berkeleydailyplanet.com. Long ones will be posted as "commentaries", short ones grouped under Letters. We do require you to sign your real name unless you can give us a good reason for believing that real, serious harm would come to you if you do so.

If you haven't looked at berkeleydailyplanet.com for a few days, you might be surprised to find that for the past week we've been launching a new "issue" almost daily, on an irregular basis as copy is submitted. One benefit of this plan is that you can read our sometimes lengthy, sometimes challenging pieces thoroughly on the day we put them online. Several readers have told us that the long, long Wednesday issues can be too much of a good thing, so that they never get around to reading everything.

As always, you can read previous issues, including the several which have appeared this week, by clicking backwards using the "Previous Issue" button on the top left side of the page.

And as you read these pieces, you should always be aware that comments long and short can be submitted to opinion@berkeleydailyplanet.com. Long ones will be posted as "commentaries", short ones grouped under Letters. We do require you to sign your real name unless you can give us a good reason for believing that real, serious harm would come to you if you do so.

We value your opinions.

Here are some easy links to get to this week’s issues, if you haven't yet tried the "previous" button.:

A bonus contribution from regular columnist Conn Hallinan has inspired us to move to a new form of daily publication. Instead of doing a weekly roundup issue on Wednesdays, as we've done for about a year, we're going to create a new "issue" as soon as we have something new to post, including comments of all kinds. If you only check out the Planet infrequently, you'll be able to see what you've missed since your last visit by clicking the "Previous Issue" button at the top of the page as many times as you need to get back to what you last saw. Since we started this practice, there have been three "new issues". Try clicking back through the "previous issue" button to see them--it's not hard.

A bonus contribution from regular columnist Conn Hallinan has inspired us to move to a new form of daily publication. Instead of doing a weekly roundup issue on Wednesdays, as we've done for about a year, we're going to create a new "issue" as soon as we have something new to post, including comments of all kinds. If you only check out the Planet infrequently, you'll be able to see what you've missed since your last visit by clicking the "Previous Issue" button at the top of the page as many times as you need to get back to what you last saw. To comment on this change or on anything else, just write us by clicking on opinion@berkeleydailyplanet.com.

A bonus contribution from regular columnist Conn Hallinan has inspired us to move to a new form of daily publication. Instead of doing a weekly roundup issue on Wednesdays, as we've done for about a year, we're going to create a new "issue" as soon as we have something new to post, including comments of all kinds. If you only check out the Planet infrequently, you'll be able to see what you've missed since your last visit by clicking the "Previous Issue" button at the top of the page as many times as you need to get back to what you last saw. To comment on this change or on anything else, just write us by clicking on opinion@berkeleydailyplanet.com.

Watson was introduced to the public as a friendly entertainment. It beat the best human player in "Jeopardy," a friendlier game than chess. Friendly. Helpful. Entertaining.

Now, the Watson computer is being used by the WellPoint health insurance company to determine how much health care to grant to each of its customers. This machine will determine who gets medical coverage, how much, and who doesn't. Who lives and who dies.

So how does this machine work? It is programmed to consider a host of factors to diagnose patients' disease, then it can determine which patients will be covered. Factors like cost and probability of recovery will be calculated, and balanced against the imperative that WellPoint makes a profit. The owners of the company can have the computer reduce the amount of coverage and thereby guarantee increased profit for themselves. If the reduction is done gradually, no one will know, no one will object. A few more people will die a bit younger than before. The average age for life expectancy drops a little. Some people live longer, so its not a hard-line execution. But gradually, this machine will enable a few to become very, very rich by reducing the health and life of everyone else. It's one more weapon in the billionaires' class warfare.

We've heard Sarah Palin and other Republican hyenas scream against imaginary "death panels" to discredit President Obama's health insurance reform. Now a private company has a machine that is programmed to run a death panel. Where are the screamers now? Bought off by the company? Will selected beneficiaries get health coverage no matter what happens?

Watson is a death panel machine, being used by a profit making company to harvest the health of its customers. Soon, every health insurance company will be using a Watson. We need health insurance regulation now, more than ever.

Last November 16, 2010, almost 11 months ago, City Auditor Ann-Marie Hogan issued a report “Employee Benefits: Tough Decisions Ahead” that concluded it was critical that Berkeley manage its liabilities to ensure long-term fiscal stability. As part of the report, Hogan requested that the City Manager report back on or before September 27, 2011 on the adoption status of her recommendations and no later than September 2012 on full implementation status of her recommendations.

Hogan’s report addressed the City’s employee benefit costs and resultant unfunded liabilities, and her most crucial recommendation was that the City ”Reduce today’s expenses and tomorrow’s liabilities.” She also recommended that the City increase transparency on financial matters, and that it “Clearly communicate costs and liabilities to Council and the public.”

Hogan’s report provided an apt view of the City’s current financial problem. Specifically, it presented the unfunded employee benefit liability at more than $250 million. It also made plain that in 2016, just five years from now, the City will be required to pay CalPERS close to $41 million as its share of payments to Berkeley retirees. Every day that these excesses and liabilities are not resolved, our City’s financial situation becomes more perilous.

Hogan’s report also described a few overly generous personnel policies, such as the accumulation of sick leave benefits and payment to employees at the end of their tenure for a portion of their sick leave benefits. The financial consequences of these policies are significant. In 2009, the City paid out $1.47 million to employees leaving the City for sick leave, vacation and other benefits.

In light of our city’s serious financial situation, it was shocking to learn recently that the response to the City Auditor’s Report will be delayed until at least January 2012 – about 14 months after the publication of the City Auditor’s report. This delay is particularly disturbing considering that five out of the six union contracts are now under negotiation since they are due to expire in June 2012. And it means that Berkeley citizens cannot vet the response to the City Auditor’s report in time to have bearing on the contract negotiations – which is unacceptable.

Rather than increasing transparency on the issue of its unfunded liabilities, the City Manager’s office is becoming a black hole of non-response. All this from a City Manager who received a hefty raise from City Council just two years ago; the Council agreed to the raise not long before Hogan’s report revealed the extent of the City’s financial crisis.

Already, other cities in the Bay Area are grappling with similar issues related to escalating personnel costs: San Francisco, Oakland, and San Jose to list a few. By watching other cities address these matters, we can learn that the solution will not be an easy one. In fact, in November, the citizens of San Francisco will be going to the polls to vote on competing ballot propositions. It may be messy, but at least citizens are being involved in the decision making process.

Yes, here in Berkeley, a series of workshops have been scheduled by the Council to address a variety of topics. But a closer inspection of the agenda reveals that the issues raised by Hogan’s report won’t be discussed, at least in part, until the December workshops – again too late.

The purpose of the Opinion is to encourage all Berkeley citizens to oppose this high-handed conduct by the City Manager’s office, and to encourage the City to embrace the reality of its current financial situation.

(Jim Fousekis is a 40-year resident of Berkeley, a retired attorney and motivated citizen. He is a supporter of a number of Berkeley institutions, including the Center for Independent Living and the Berkeley Public Education Foundation and an active Democrat, and recently became involved with Berkeley Budget SOS – a community group committed to transparency in financial matters. He can be reached at berkeleybudgetsos@gmail.com.)

"Arreguin thinks that Berkeley could minimize the number of vacant storefronts by charging landlords a fee when buildings lie fallow for an extended period of time. He will ask the City Council tonight to send a directive to the city manager’s office to study the issue."

As Arreguin seems to know, a simple "vacancy tax" would be illegal under California law. Municipalities may impose fees only for the actual cost of services or facilities provided by the City specifically to that property owner on account of the vacancy. The idea of a straightforward penalty for not renting out a vacant spot has been dreamed of time and again in many cities, and it always stalls on this basic point. Vacancy is a "by right" use which municipalities are prohibited from penalizing.

Penalties for actual blight, which is not the same thing as a well maintained vacant space, are fine. Penalties because of higher numbers of service calls are fine. Penalties simply for being vacant aren't.

That's presumably why Arreguin is suggesting a "vacancy registration fee" - a model that has been used in other states with laws similar to California's. In theory, it could work something like this (details may vary but this is the gist):

The city makes a finding that, in general, vacant storefronts are more likely than others to accumulate code violations (such as graffiti, weeds, broken windows) and higher numbers of service calls to the police, etc. The City has an interest in addressing the code violations that pertain to actual blight and in recovering the costs of service calls necessitated by the vacancy.

Therefore, the city establishes a policy to step up code enforcement on those properties with more frequent inspections and so forth.

For that purpose, the city must maintain a list of such properties and use more staff hours to inspect and enforce.

The fee can nominally cover those extra expenses. For example, if once a month an inspector comes around and writes up violations for graffiti and such, the fee can cover the cost of those inspections and the staff time needed to process the citation. If there are legitimate service calls that can reasonably be attributed to the vacancy, the City can use fees to recover those costs.

One reason that this end around might run into legal problems is that the city's finding that the vacant properties are a greater source of code violations and service calls must be supported by facts. Otherwise, property owners could argue in court that the City is fibbing and trying to impose an unlawful vacancy penalty -- in effect a shakedown by the city to pay for unnecessary staff hours.

Another legal problem is that the fees charged must actually reasonably correspond to the expenses the City incurs doing the extra code enforcement. Property owners can challenge fees which are unreasonably high -- courts can order the fees to be lowered.

Assuming that the City makes its findings, that they hold up in court, and that the fees are set to a legally justified level, there are still practical problems:

Unless the City is, in fact, spending hundreds of dollars per month per vacant property on reasonable things, the fees will be low -- perhaps too low to provide any incentive to property owners to change.

Conversely, if the fees are justifiably high enough, property owners have an incentive to populate vacancies with placeholder tenants that don't necessarily contribute in any significant way to the local economy. In this way, the only practical outcome might be new businesses whose ultimate function is to turn on the lights during business hours and perhaps maintain a window display. (Aside: in Berkeley, you'd think, people could get very creative about such placeholder businesses. Perhaps this would be good policy.)

Proposing a "vacancy registration fee" can, however, win political props for a politician, even if no fee is ultimately imposed. Arreguin's action here submits the idea for consideration by City staff. That makes him look good even if the idea dies there or if staff comes back with a negative recommendation.

"Those kinds of businesses don’t exist in Berkeley. Instead, most of the retail space for rent is in older buildings where the space tends to be very deep. The stores were designed that way because decades ago store owners needed a lot of storage space in the back to keep their goods. Nowadays, store owners don’t need a store 50 feet deep because they can get goods delivered overnight, said Korman. They mostly just want the six feet of window space fronting the street. But they still have to pay for the larger and deeper space."

Mr. Korman has brilliantly cut to the heart of the matter, and this is a good starting point for developing public policy. To his insight about the changed nature of retail we can add observations about the changing nature of high tech businesses and culture businesses, and the restrictions imposed by Berkeley's zoning of commercial districts:

A 50 foot deep space in a desirable urban commercial district may no longer be suitable for typical retail use, but it would be ideal as an office space for many kinds of Internet-based high tech companies. Companies that run web sites or develop "apps" for smart phones start comfortably in spaces of this size and some can stay that size for long periods of time. They need space for desks and chairs and a network connection. Preferably, because these businesses often seek to attract young professionals, these offices should be located in stimulating urban environments - like Berkeley. The catch is that in our retail districts, zoning rules typically don't allow retail spaces to be converted to use by businesses that don't maintain a storefront open to the public.

On the other hand, as the experience of San Francisco has shown, there is pent up demand for new forms of cultural space in urban environments: unconventional galleries and performance spaces, for example. The catch is that without financial support, cultural businesses are difficult to make viable in high rent districts.

The two modes of use, offices for young urban professionals and exciting cultural spaces in an urban environment, are complementary. Cultural businesses make a location more attractive to high tech start-ups. High tech start-ups provide a core constituency for new cultural experiments.

Rather than trying to find sketchy ways to penalize owners for vacancies, perhaps public policy would be better served by trying to enable a careful adjustment to zoning, and a new business development policy.

Picture a 50 foot deep retail space, now vacant. In the back (which need not be walled off), what used to be for inventory storage can be converted to office use. In the front, the lobbies of these new ventures, space can be sublet to cultural businesses.

There has been much clamor by some to convert our West Berkeley industrial zone to office park use with the hope of attracting and retaining start-ups. This is a bit of a pipe dream because businesses at that scale can find much less expensive space elsewhere in the Bay Area, and if shoved into West Berkeley would not directly enjoy the benefits of our urban environments.

Perhaps it turns out that our "office park" already exists, right under our noses. It's been here all the while in the form of vacancies in our retail districts. We can zone to allow "offices in the back, culture up front". We can advertise and offer light incentives to venture capitalists and entrepreneurs -- as well as artists -- to begin to take up the offer.

Too much clicking. I preferred the old method of adding new stuff to the top of the page. Letters and opinion can wait a week. Mix the analysis in at the top.

Judi Sierra

* * *

Palestinian Statehood

President Obama should follow through on his stated promise (made to the UN General Assembly on September 22, 2010) to usher in a Palestinian state in 2011. A US veto of the forthcoming vote to grant Statehood to the long suffering Palestinians would be an act of extreme betrayal and would further diminish US standing, credibility and influence in the Arab world.

President Obama should heed the wise words of SEYMOUR D. REICH, the former chairman of the Conference of Presidents of Major American Jewish Organizations, who stated “Mr. Netanyahu must step back from the brink. He should cast aside his far-right coalition members, form a government with moderate parties and add a freeze on settlement construction and offer to negotiate without preconditions. This would demonstrate seriousness. If he does not, the United States should put a deal on the table, and Israelis should vigorously push their government to accept it (NYT September 13).” If Obama continues to buckle to Israeli and local pressures he will only intensify the anger in the Arab world and further expose the blatant partiality towards Israel. This will endanger both Israel and the US. While our own fragile economy is drowning in a sea of red ink we can no longer afford to send welfare checks to Israel – whose standard of living, in many ways, is higher than our own.

Jagjit Singh

* * *

My Thinking

I hear a lot about how jobs will become available thanks to the magical power of those folks who are members of Congress now. But those who are in Congress now do not represent the weakest members of society. How long will it be before we see improvements for the poorest people? How long will it be before we provide opportunities so that poor people, too, can get educated and be able to own their own homes? If rainwater does not run down from the higher level to the ground, people living in the upper levels will not get the the food they need. We are all interdependent. All of us are not at once farmers, doctors, teachers, businessmen, builders. electricians or blacksmiths. The point I am trying to make is that we can't ignore the basic needs of our fellow human beings and abandon them to poverty with nothing to satisfy their basic needs of food, clothing and shelter. Sometimes I think that if people got a minimum to fill their stomachs and basic opportunity to work their outlook might change. Instead of creating trouble for others and joining anti-social gangs they may feel for a society which is caring and supportive during dark days in their lives. This new increment of trust will save us from social upheaval. We will be able to economize on money for building more prisons. So far we have tried punitive ways of obtaining safety. Let us try a supportive and caring way this time around.

Romila Khanna

* * *

Greek Debt

For most of the past decade, Greece has run up budget deficits well beyond limits set by the European Union, a group of 27 nations that allow goods and workers to cross their borders freely. When Greece fell into recession two years ago, bondholders worried they wouldn’t get their money back. To make sure they do, the EU is lending money to Greece, essentially allowing it to use new debt to pay off old debt. Greece looks like a bad bet. Its publicly held debt is more than 140 percent of its annual economic output, or gross domestic product. U.S. debt is 67 percent. Greece is a tiny player in Europe. It has a $305 billion economy, about the size of Maryland’s and 2 percent of the whole EU’s. And if it does default, it will have plenty of company. In the past 30 years, 20 European and Latin American countries have stiffed their creditors, some repeatedly. The list includes Turkey in 1982, Mexico in 1994, Russia in 1998 and Argentina in 2001.

Most important: If Greece defaults, investors will worry that two much larger EU members, Italy and Spain, might follow. For the U.S., a European recession would come at an especially bad time. Europe buys about 20 percent of U.S. exports. And exports have been a big driver of U.S. economic growth recently. With the U.S. slowing, it can’t afford a downturn in such a crucial market. “It’s not just a country floating out there that happens to default,” says Steve H. Hanke, an economist at Johns Hopkins University. “The whole monetary union gets thrown into doubt.”

When I received my notification of acceptance from University of California, Berkeley I cried. I called my father and he wept. There was screaming and cheering and days of telling everyone I could about my incredible good fortune. As if I had won the lottery. I mean, really, I’d been accepted into the best public university in the world. Best in the world. Me: a two-time community college drop-out. Me: the girl who drank through her junior year of high school. Me: small-town kid from Washington state who was considered a success because she hadn’t gotten pregnant or addicted to methamphetamines yet. Everyone got a phone call. “Ruby’s going to Berkeley!” There wasn’t a discussion, just working out the details so that I could get down there and start studying. My dad tapped into IRAs and life savings. We filled out all the forms we had to for the financial aid package that would double my debt within a year. It was worth it. It was Cal. I stayed up at night reading about courses I could take, surfing the internet for virtual tours of the campus. Over and over I found myself watching Mario Savio’s infamous December speech on the steps of Sproul Hall. I’d make friends and family watch, too, and explain matter-of-factly, “I’m going to stand on those steps. I’m going to go down there and changing the world.”

Less than two months later my sister and I were driving a van down the I-5 corridor; heading to my new apartment in Oakland and to my incoming student orientation. We were still completely awestruck. When we saw the first exit for Berkeley we both screamed. I could see the Campanile on the hill for the first time in real life. My heart was pounding. “This is it, dude! This is where everything begins.” The opening speech at orientation made me cry all over again.

My sister grabbed my arm and squeezed it tight. “Holy shit,” she silently mouthed to me as the professor told us what incredible human beings we are and how fantastically extraordinary we must be if we were accepted here. This theme was pounded into our heads over and over during the initiation process. “You are so lucky to be here. We could have had anyone and we wanted you.” We were to be grateful for this opportunity and we were to never question the authorities that brought us there.

After the chaos of orientation was over, we decided to walk the three miles from campus to my new apartment. We left the towering white marble buildings and the yuppie-soaked sidewalks of Berkeley and made our way down the hill into Oakland. Ironic coffee shops and bookstores quickly faded out in favor of churches, liquor stores, and barred-up windows. The overwhelmingly white students of UCB disappeared and the majority population turned black. I started to feel sick, all clenched teeth and hard footsteps. “What the fuck, dude? I’m going to a school that the people who actually live here can’t afford to attend. How the hell are Oakland and Berkeley adjacent to each other and absolutely nothing alike? They did that on purpose. That is so fucked up.”

A week later I started my first class. I was taking one class over the summer to get the swing of it and finish up my last admission requirement. It was an English class on the Black Arts Movement taught by an incredible graduate student. We read Amiri Baraka and Ishmael Reed. I fell in love with the honesty of an entire generation of people and the discussions that my professor facilitated were thought provoking and beautiful. The class had eleven other students and it was two hours of bliss, twice a week. This was what I’d come to Berkeley for. Learning about people that wanted to change the world and discussing it with the people who— in the not so distant future—would. I got a 4.0 that term. But I was still boggled by the fact that all my neighbors were black and all my classmates were white.

The fact that even though I could ride my bike to my school, it was still so incredibly out of reach to anyone I spent my off time with. And I began to question why I was paying close to $30,000 of money I didn’t have to support an institution that is not only not helping their community, but actually cutting the benefits of the people that work there. How could I go home and talk to my neighbors, single immigrant parents who worked on the custodial staff at Cal, who weren’t getting a raise this year and were facing not being able to pay their rent. Where the hell was my money going? It wasn’t even my money. It was my debt that I was willingly taking on to support a system that is so profoundly broken. A system that continues to raise tuition and drop standards. While the vital workforce is denied their promised pay increases, a new football stadium is built. While the students drink coffee in the Free Speech Movement Café, no one mentions how nothing that influential has happened at Cal since. I came to this school because I foolishly believed that it practiced the things it preached. I came to this school because I thought that I was giving my time and money to an institution that wanted its students to succeed and genuinely believed in humanity. I came to this school on a forty-year-old premise and a romanticized idea.

When Mario Savio stood on the steps of Sproul on December 2, 1964 he said, “There is a time when the operation of the machine becomes so odious, makes you so sick at heart, that you can't take part; you can't even passively take part, and you've got to put your bodies upon the gears and upon the wheels, upon the levers, upon all the apparatus, and you've got to make it stop.” The students and faculty of Cal all know this, but they do not live it. It’s the big-picture equivalent of standing on a street corner in Nikes, trying to get a petition to close sweatshops signed. Coming in, I knew that universities were corporations cleverly disguised as pinnacles for higher education where great minds would meet and build the future. I naively believed that Berkeley had to be different. Unfortunately, the school has had its reputation so well cemented that it no longer has to provide that difference. In a world where a Bachelor’s Degree is just another box that you are expected to check if you want to “succeed”, the premiere university to earn it at can let thousands of students pass through unnoticed without anyone raising an eyebrow. They can treat their employees badly. They can raise their tuition and fees in tandem with their administrator’s salary. They can put 500 students in a classroom and charge hundreds of dollars for a term’s worth of books. They can turn out a graduating class of privileged white kids that don’t understand a thing about the real world or why they are now part of the problem. I understand that this problem is not unique. I understand that the university system is inherently corrupt. I understand that the country is fundamentally broken. These are all things that I know—that Cal would never teach me, mind you. What I also understand is that being angry is not enough. That no matter how many students turn out to rallies about tuition hikes or talk about how Berkeley ought to take better care of its employees or how wrong it is that minority groups—even when they are in majority—are not presented with the same options and few will go to university we are still supporting it. We still take on the debt or hand over the cash to help this machine perpetuate this type of blatant corruption.

So I had a choice to make. I could go through the next two years and continue to take on tens of thousands of dollars of personal debt to fuel this corrupt machine for a piece of a paper that may or may not do me any good. I could continue to put my life on hold and act as if I’m going to be able to be proud of the place I got my degree. Like I’m going to be able to hang it on a wall and go fight for human rights and social justice and not remember the employees on staff that were taken advantage of right in front of me while I got it. (Maybe even so I could get it.) I could act like the mountain of debt putting a choke-hold on me while I try to enter the professional world is really going to be worth the educational quality. Like there will be anything I got at Cal that I couldn’t get somewhere else for half the price and a quarter of the social injustice. Or I could leave. My parents raised me knowing that you vote with your dollar more often than your ballot. And I positively refuse to continue to support what the University of California system is doing. We’re here again, Mario Savio. It has become so odious that I must throw my body against the gears. It may not stop the machine, but my withdrawal most definitely won’t help it continue forward in this way.

A relative of mine is a young fellow we call "The Professor" on account of his status as a grad student in economics. Lately The Professor has begun making his case against corporatism including but not limited to the horrible state of the world financial system.

Today news reached his mid-western school of protests on Wall Street. According the Wall Street Journal a group convened for the radical cause of "[drawing] attention to the role powerful financial matters play in damaging the U.S. economy." The protest was colorful and mildly eccentric. It was photogenic and provided a pleasant scene to amuse the bored police officers looking on. No one was harmed and no dinner reservations were lost. Attention was drawn to how the economy is powerfully financial and it matters.

The Professor wondered allowed, "Can't we do any better than this?"

From the other coast I sent word his way. Here is what I had to say:

Dear Professor,

That's pretty abstract to have much mass appeal, isn't it? Their goal is to "draw attention to the role powerful financial matters play in damaging the U.S. economy?" Man, that is some hard hitting bad-ass talk, right there. And what exactly is the credible threat of a successful protest on Wall Street -- the bad guys have to walk an extra block to catch a cab?

For the past several weeks in San Francisco protests have, for some hours during the evening commute, managed to mostly shut down one of the major BART stations. Initially, it was a demand that BART's transit police stop killing passengers and, in fact, disband. That demand stands. Then one of the protests didn't materialize but... where it was expected, BART turned off cell phone service in that station (to thwart "flash mobs"). As a consequence the next protest was especially well attended, successfully shutting down a station, with the added demand to "never do that cell phone thing again, asshats!"

Then the next week a demand was added for "Spare the Fare Thursdays" -- free commute on Thursdays and they'll shut down a station each Monday during commute unless this demand is also met. The main BART spokesman, meanwhile, admitted to the press that turning off the cellphone service was an idea that came from his office. So, he's on leave of absence and the "group" Anonymous published some photos of this same spokesman at a swinging gay party showing off most of his (quite long!) Johnson. The San Francisco Chronicle is not even entirely taking sides ... more of an "a pox on both your houses" kind of position. The spokesman with the long schlong got back involved to help coordinate a press conference. He wrote scripts to have commuters deliver, rented $872 worth of SUV time (using BART funds) and directed staff to find people on the street who would read the scripts about how the protesters were endangering lives and keeping people away from sick grannies and causing small children to fall below average in their schoolwork. The recruitment attempt was mostly unsuccessful and the SUVs went unused - nearly a grand down the toilet. And the affair was leaked to the press corp who, with one voice, decried "not cricket you well endowed but reckless BART spokesman".

Thanks for the mocha/palestinian art article. I had no idea about this and now I'll certainly attend a viewing Sat 24 outside the museum. Also, the Eaton article on hummingbirds was super cool. I love that people can do serious research on this stuff and teach us something new.

There are clearly different shades of green on the Richmond City Council.

There are those greens who believe global climate change is truly a crisis that we must address at every level of government – and quickly. Then there are those for whom the green of cannabis eclipses the more global meaning of green. And finally, there is the green of money – lots of it – including tens of thousands of dollars from the cannabis industry that has found its way into some council members’ campaign coffers.

Failing to pass the sustainable marijuana ordinance was a disappointment for me. The Richmond City Council has been “high” on marijuana for some time, paving the way for three licenses that are now in the application stage. At least a couple of Council members want to increase that to four, on the theory that if three is good, four is better. At least one councilmember touts marijuana dispensaries as veritable police substations, making areas of Richmond in the vicinity of a dispensary the safest of all.

Now, I really don’t care who smokes weed or why they do it, other than minors, but I remain skeptical about the hypocritical institutionalizing of an industry that characterizes itself as the epitome of healthy living and natural holistic medicine when it is really mostly about money – lots of it.

I introduced the “green” marijuana ordinance after reading a paper, “Energy Up in Smoke, The Carbon Footprint of Indoor Cannabis Production,” (April 5, 2011) by Evan Mills, Ph.D. a long-time energy analyst and Staff Scientist at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, University of California.

Mills finds that indoor Cannabis production results in energy expenditures of $5 billion each year, with electricity use equivalent to that of 2 million average U.S. homes. This corresponds to 1% of national electricity consumption or 2% of that in households. The yearly greenhouse-gas pollution (carbon dioxide, CO2 ) from the electricity plus associated transportation fuels equals that of 3 million cars. Energy costs constitute a quarter of wholesale value. In California, the top-producing state—and one of 17 states to allow cultivation for medical purposes—the practice is responsible for about 3% of all electricity use or 8% of household use. Due to higher electricity prices and cleaner fuels used to make electricity, California incurs 70% of national energy costs but only 20% of national CO2 emissions. From the perspective of individual consumers, a single Cannabis cigarette represents 2 pounds of CO2 emissions, an amount equal to running a 100-watt light bulb for 17 hours with average U.S. electricity (or 30 hours on California’s cleaner grid). Each four-by-four-foot production module doubles the electricity use of an average U.S. home and triples that of an average California home. The added electricity use is equivalent to running about 30 refrigerators. Processed Cannabis results in 3000-times its weight in CO2 emissions. For off-grid production, it requires 70 gallons of diesel fuel to produce one indoor Cannabis plant, or 140 gallons with smaller, less-efficient gasoline generators.

The Richmond City Council has supported dozens of environmental initiatives designed to make Richmond a leader in sustainability and greenhouse gas reduction. For examples, see City of Richmond Environmental Initiatives. But when being green bumped up against the different shade of green of the marijuana industry, pot clearly prevailed at the Richmond City Council.

For the entire report on this agenda item, see: INTRODUCE an ordinance (first reading) amending Richmond Municipal Code Section 7.102.060 (concerning the operations of Medical Marijuana Collectives) to require Collectives operating within the city to obtain their marijuana from those who grow outdoors without artificial lights, or who grow indoors using only solar-powered artificial lighting>

Vice Mayor Butt (620-6851). Mayor McLaughlin and Jeff Ritterman supported the “green” marijuana ordinance, but it lost on a 3-1-2 vote. In another agenda item, the City Council reversed an administrative decision by the Police Department to allow an applicant who missed a deadline for an application fee to continue to compete for one of the three coveted Richmond marijuana dispensary licenses. This is when it was suggested that going to four licenses would mitigate the impact on those applicants who filed on time.

Last year, I was the author of a measure to allow the voters to establish Richmond’s tax on medicinal marijuana sales at 10%, but the City Council knocked it back to 5%. That extra money would have hired more cops, paved streets and kept libraries open longer, but the Council was reluctant to erect too many barriers between a stoner and his medicine. At the same time, Sacramento and San Jose voters passed 10% taxes.

San Jose is reducing its dispensaries from an estimated 140 to just ten, creating a ratio of about one dispensary for each 50,000 people. Richmond now allows three, a ratio of one per 34,000 people. As I said before, some council members want to increase it to one per 26,000 people. There must be a lot more sick people in Richmond than in San Jose.

Prior to 9/11, the threat of radical Islamism as a massive, sinister organized force of destruction, specifically in the form of al-Qaeda, was a myth perpetrated by politicians in many countries—and particularly American neo-conservatives in the Bush inner circle—in an attempt to unite and inspire their people following the failure of earlier, more utopian ideologies. 9/11 put al-Qaeda on the map and our budget-busting wars in Afghanistan and Iraq gave al-Qaeda legitimacy and an excellent recruiting tool. In the meantime, under constant fear mongering, Americans gave up their privacy and rights in the name of security. America’s “mission accomplished” has created an unstable, divided, economically devastated nation. Closure to me would begin with a public apology from Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld, and Rice. Instead, we will get more self-serving books like Cheney's "In My Time." Are we winning this so called war on terrorism?

In summer 2005, Berkeley resident John Gertz confirmed to a Daily Planet reporter the rumors that he had indeed packed the Peace and Justice Commission with persons who could be depended on not to criticize Israel.“What I have observed is that a lot of people were sick of the commission being run by the lunatic left and some brave people came forward to put a stop to it,” he said.

Although I was at the time aware of widespread censorship activities by the Jewish lobby, I was naively shocked to learn that the same processes were at work in liberal Berkeley, the home of the Free Speech Movement, a city where people frequently and publicly debate each other over everything possibly debatable.

As a result of my shock and upset, I wrote an op-ed to the Berkeley Daily Planet, one which proved to be the first of several I would write over the ensuing years. Because I saw the Planet as a local paper focusing on local issues, in none of these did I ever address the Israel/Palestine conflict directly nor U.S. foreign policy with respect to it. Rather, I wrote only about what I had written about that first time: local actions of the Jewish lobby to control what might or might not be said about these issues. My concern was that people might have the freedom to learn, think, speak, and take action about Israel as about anything else and I saw my commentaries as a contribution towards exposing a national, in fact international, operation to prevent this.

As all Daily Planet readers know, three men—John Gertz, Dan Spitzer, and Jim Sinkinson—took it upon themselves to destroy the paper because it was providing in its open editorial page policy a rarely available platform for dialogue about Israel. It’s hard for me to describe the frustration and hopelessness I felt while watching them go about their business of intimidation so systematically and relentlessly, especially because I knew that their efforts were being duplicated—and similarly succeeding—in hundreds, even thousands of localities, wherever anyone, no matter how out-of-the-way, unimportant, or inadvertent, either suggested alternatives to the official Israeli narrative or provided space for someone else to do so.

In those years in which the Planet struggle was going on, the conflict which had generated it also felt intractable. I grew used to hearing many different speakers— Americans, Israelis, and Palestinians; Jews and non-Jews; academicians, politicians, artists, soldiers, and activists—end their talks by saying “I see no way out,” expressing the same gloomy conclusion which I myself had reached. Eventually, however, I came to believe that although at that time the situation was intractable, eventually it would not be, on the grounds that in general nothing ever stays the same, and that Israel (in particular) is an inherently unstable project, based as it is on preservation of a Jewish majority, addition of land to its (undefined) territory, maintenance of regional hegemony through a combination of alliances with unpopular leaders and military threat, and reliance on unquestioning U.S. support—none of which is likely to last forever.

This past Saturday, the San Francisco Chronicle published an article about the cancellation—due to unspecified “pressure from the community”—by the Oakland Museum of Children’s Art (MOCHA) of an exhibition of children’s art from Gaza which had been brought here by the Middle East Children’s Alliance and which was due to open in two weeks.

This is the sort of thing that not long ago would have raised my blood pressure and even possibly generated still another letter to the Planet editor. Now, although I called the museum to protest and will do whatever else I can to urge them to reverse their decision, I found myself remarkably not upset. I felt as if whoever is behind the “community pressure" might as well not bother to stick their fingers in the dyke because the water is already pouring through. My response is a measure of all the remarkable changes that have happened during the past six-year period of (apparent) hopeless immobility. I here list five.

(1) Israel’s own aggressions, particularly the summer 2006 attack on Lebanon, the January 2009 attack on Gaza, and the 2010 attack on the Gaza flotilla. While Israel may have had internal reasons for these undertakings, it failed to take into consideration a changed world—among other things linked together by the Internet and no longer dependent on big media—in which its justifications proved ineffectual. It should be mentioned also that Israel lost the Lebanon “war,” its first loss ever, representing an incalculable shift in power relations in the region.

(2) The emergence of a dynamic new generation of leadership in Palestine (including many women) who are smart, media savvy, internationalist in outlook, focused on clear goals, pragmatic, and inventive. Israel is having difficulty mustering the same old outrage and disdain against nonviolent protestors marching to the wall in “Avatar” costumes, for example, or against an international college- and church-based coalition using the classic nonviolent tactics of boycott, divestment, and sanctions that it mustered successfully against Arafat in his military uniform, keffiyeh, and scraggly beard.

(3) The battles now raging in the American Jewish community where the longtime repression of dissent re Israel has collapsed. News of this development has yet to reach Washington, from which, for example, 81 congressmembers, 1/3 of the freshmen class, visited Israel this summer because they could not afford not to. Nevertheless, this accelerating breakdown of solidarity among American Jews will, I believe, eventually release the government from its Israel commitment, from which it already would clearly love to be released.

(4) The suddenly emergent and ongoing struggle of Arab people across the Middle East and North Africa for control of their own lives.

(5) The rapid and stunning decline of the U.S. as a world force, economically, militarily, and morally, and the tentative emergence of other power centers.

Thus, as the PLO plans to go forward with its bid for state recognition in the U.N. next week, the effort to keep children’s art out of a children’s art museum in Oakland looks, in context, rather more futile than similar actions undertaken a mere six years ago.

I still can see absolutely no good way out of the impasse that is the Israeli/Palestinian conflict, at least not one that is even imaginably politically feasible, and I cannot exclude many terrible possible futures, up to and including the employment of a paranoid Israel’s nuclear arsenal.

All I can say is that in the summer of 2005 I could not have imagined writing what I have just written now. As Bob Dylan sang, “The times they are a-changing,” and as Zhou Enlai supposedly remarked about the French Revolution, “It’s too soon to tell.”

There are clearly different shades of green on the Richmond City Council.

There are those greens who believe global climate change is truly a crisis that we must address at every level of government – and quickly. Then there are those for whom the green of cannabis eclipses the more global meaning of green. And finally, there is the green of money – lots of it – including tens of thousands of dollars from the cannabis industry that has found its way into some council members’ campaign coffers.

Failing to pass the sustainable marijuana ordinance was a disappointment for me. The Richmond City Council has been “high” on marijuana for some time, paving the way for three licenses that are now in the application stage. At least a couple of Council members want to increase that to four, on the theory that if three is good, four is better. At least one councilmember touts marijuana dispensaries as veritable police substations, making areas of Richmond in the vicinity of a dispensary the safest of all.

Now, I really don’t care who smokes weed or why they do it, other than minors, but I remain skeptical about the hypocritical institutionalizing of an industry that characterizes itself as the epitome of healthy living and natural holistic medicine when it is really mostly about money – lots of it.

I introduced the “green” marijuana ordinance after reading a paper, “Energy Up in Smoke, The Carbon Footprint of Indoor Cannabis Production,” (April 5, 2011) by Evan Mills, Ph.D. a long-time energy analyst and Staff Scientist at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, University of California.

Mills finds that indoor Cannabis production results in energy expenditures of $5 billion each year, with electricity use equivalent to that of 2 million average U.S. homes. This corresponds to 1% of national electricity consumption or 2% of that in households. The yearly greenhouse-gas pollution (carbon dioxide, CO2 ) from the electricity plus associated transportation fuels equals that of 3 million cars. Energy costs constitute a quarter of wholesale value. In California, the top-producing state—and one of 17 states to allow cultivation for medical purposes—the practice is responsible for about 3% of all electricity use or 8% of household use. Due to higher electricity prices and cleaner fuels used to make electricity, California incurs 70% of national energy costs but only 20% of national CO2 emissions. From the perspective of individual consumers, a single Cannabis cigarette represents 2 pounds of CO2 emissions, an amount equal to running a 100-watt light bulb for 17 hours with average U.S. electricity (or 30 hours on California’s cleaner grid). Each four-by-four-foot production module doubles the electricity use of an average U.S. home and triples that of an average California home. The added electricity use is equivalent to running about 30 refrigerators. Processed Cannabis results in 3000-times its weight in CO2 emissions. For off-grid production, it requires 70 gallons of diesel fuel to produce one indoor Cannabis plant, or 140 gallons with smaller, less-efficient gasoline generators.

The Richmond City Council has supported dozens of environmental initiatives designed to make Richmond a leader in sustainability and greenhouse gas reduction. For examples, see City of Richmond Environmental Initiatives. But when being green bumped up against the different shade of green of the marijuana industry, pot clearly prevailed at the Richmond City Council.

For the entire report on this agenda item, see: INTRODUCE an ordinance (first reading) amending Richmond Municipal Code Section 7.102.060 (concerning the operations of Medical Marijuana Collectives) to require Collectives operating within the city to obtain their marijuana from those who grow outdoors without artificial lights, or who grow indoors using only solar-powered artificial lighting>

Vice Mayor Butt (620-6851). Mayor McLaughlin and Jeff Ritterman supported the “green” marijuana ordinance, but it lost on a 3-1-2 vote. In another agenda item, the City Council reversed an administrative decision by the Police Department to allow an applicant who missed a deadline for an application fee to continue to compete for one of the three coveted Richmond marijuana dispensary licenses. This is when it was suggested that going to four licenses would mitigate the impact on those applicants who filed on time.

Last year, I was the author of a measure to allow the voters to establish Richmond’s tax on medicinal marijuana sales at 10%, but the City Council knocked it back to 5%. That extra money would have hired more cops, paved streets and kept libraries open longer, but the Council was reluctant to erect too many barriers between a stoner and his medicine. At the same time, Sacramento and San Jose voters passed 10% taxes.

San Jose is reducing its dispensaries from an estimated 140 to just ten, creating a ratio of about one dispensary for each 50,000 people. Richmond now allows three, a ratio of one per 34,000 people. As I said before, some council members want to increase it to one per 26,000 people. There must be a lot more sick people in Richmond than in San Jose.

Columns

Earlier this year I reported on a study out of Finland that contended that, in Europe at least, passerine (songbird) species with relatively larger brains made out better in urban areas than did smaller-brained species. Winners included corvids (crows and magpies), tits (relatives of the North American chickadees), nuthatches, and wrens. Buntings, Old World warblers, and Old Word flycatchers were among the small-brained city avoiders.

Well, science marches on. Now there’s another report, this time from a group of German and Czech biologists, purporting to show that large-brained passerines benefited more from the fall of Communism than small-brained passerines.

Jiri Reif and colleagues analyzed population trends for 57 species from 1991 to 2007 in the Czech Republic, the former East Germany, and, as a control, the northern portion of the former West Germany. They looked for effects of habitat, diet, climate preference, migratory strategy, and relative brain size as a proxy for cognitive ability.

Their conclusion: larger brain size correlated with strong population increases in the Czech Republic and weaker increases in eastern Germany. As in the broader Finnish study, the corvids and tits led the pack. Northwestern Germany, though, showed no clear trend.

If it weren’t for the national differences, I’d wonder about spurious correlations here. Corvids, with a few sad exceptions like the Hawai’ian crow, are among the most adaptable of birds. I’m not surprised that their Czech populations have grown since the Velvet Revolution. It’s likely their populations in most places have grown since Crash of 2008, or 9/11, or the cancellation of Star Trek, the original series.

As to why those particular patterns, the others say the years since 1989 saw an increase in parks and other green spaces in urban areas and a middle-class exodus to newly built suburbs. Corvids and tits had the smarts and behavioral flexibility to exploit both city parkland and suburban habitats; less-favored birds did not. This begs the question of what all that suburban housing replaced and displaced, but give them the benefit of the doubt. Brainier birds also coped more successfully with agricultural intensification. Northwestern Germany, they argue, didn’t undergo the same economic/demographic changes as its ex-Communist neighbors, so there were no new worlds for the corvids to conquer.

I’d like a little more context about the underlying changes. The Soviet Union and its European satellites did not have stellar environmental records. Decision makers in centrally-planned economies were just as prone to externalize environmental (and social) costs as their capitalist counterparts. But the damage they did may have been constrained by inefficiency and inertia; consider the post-Gorbachev pillage of Siberia.

Another, older article suggests that the old regimes may at least have been good for native birds. A couple of years ago, biologists at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem reported that the isolation of the Eastern bloc during the Cold War led to a decline in introductions of non-native species. Only six non-European bird species became established in Eastern Europe between 1949 and 1991, versus 52 in Western Europe. The latter group had a preponderance of parrots, finches, and other pet-trade standards.

I hope someone does a follow-up. You have to wonder if there are flocks of wild parrots in Bucharest and Sofia these days.

One week after President Obama addressed a joint session of Congress and proposed the American Jobs Act, House Speaker John Boehner responded for the Republicans. Not with a plan to address the US jobs’ crisis, but with conservative talking points that indicate how difficult it will be to pass meaningful legislation.

The Problem: The two Parties disagree on the origin of the crisis. In his September 8th address Obama indicated the crisis resulted from erosion of America’s social compact: “[belief] in a country where everyone gets a fair shake and does their fair share -- where if you stepped up, did your job, and were loyal to your company, that loyalty would be rewarded with a decent salary and good benefits.”

In contrast, in his September 15th response Speaker Boehner blamed the Federal government, “there’s a fundamental misunderstanding of the economy that leads to a lot of bad decisions in Washington, D.C.” “Private-sector job creators of all sizes have been… slammed by uncertainty from the constant threat of new taxes, out-of-control spending, and unnecessary regulation.” “Job creators in America are essentially on strike.”

Neither side admitted the real problem, the American economy is broken. A healthy economy depends upon steady consumption by working Americans. But starting with Ronald Reagan, Republican ideologues have assumed that rich folks buying yachts and vacation homes would catalyze the consumer economy. This didn’t happened. In 2011 average Americans aren’t consuming because they either don’t have the money or are saving it because they are fearful. Republican dogma fractured the US economy and caused massive unemployment.

One Solution: Cut Taxes: Obama’s plan would cost $447 billion. Of this amount, tax cuts comprise more than half. $175 billion would result from cutting employee payroll taxes in half in 2012; this would affect 160 million workers and typically result in $1500 tax savings per household. Another $65 billion in tax cuts would result from cutting employer payroll taxes in half in 2012.

Speaker Boehner didn’t reject this aspect of the President’s proposal but he minimized it: “It strikes me as odd that at a time when it’s clear that the tax code needs to be fundamentally reformed, the first instinct out of Washington is to come up with a host of new tax credits that make the tax code more complex.” Boehner trusts business to do the right thing so long as the “threat of government” is eliminated – “[Businesses] are trying to help create more jobs, but the government is getting in their way.” The speaker called for reduction in regulations, taxes, and “the spending binge in Washington.”

Another Solution: Rehire Workers: After tax cuts, the remaining $202 billion in Obama’s plan funds reemployment programs. Of this amount slightly less than half -- $99 billion, goes for two items: infrastructure and Unemployment Insurance. Obama proposed $50 billion for “immediate investments in infrastructure.” After infrastructure, the next largest amount, $49 billion, is allocated to “reform our Unemployment Insurance system to provide greater flexibility, while ensuring 6 million people do not lose benefits.”

Speaker Boehner chose not to address most of the President’s specific proposals and instead spoke in generalities: “…much of the talk in Washington right now is basically about more of the same. More initiatives that seem to have more to do with the next election than the next generation… initiatives that seem to be more about micromanaging economic decisions than liberating them.” “We need to liberate our economy from the shackles of Washington.”

Boehner did comment on the infrastructure proposal: “…if we want to do it in a way that truly supports long-term economic growth and job creation, let’s link the next highway bill to an expansion of American-made energy production.”

The Price Tag: In his September 8th speech, President Obama proposed to add the additional $447 billion to the work of the Joint Select Committee of Congress: “The agreement we passed in July… charges this Congress to come up with an additional $1.5 trillion in savings by Christmas. Tonight, I am asking you to increase that amount so that it covers the full cost of the American Jobs Act.” On September 12th, the White House said they believed the bulk of the cost of the American Jobs Act could be raised by: “limiting the itemized deductions, such as those for charitable contributions and other expenditures, that may be taken by individuals making more than $200,000 a year and families making over $250,000 a year.” Speaker Boehner rejected this notion: “Tax increases… are not a viable option for the Joint Committee.”

The Bottom Line: The latest NEW YORK TIMES/CBS NEWS poll indicated that Americans support Obama’s jobs plan. Strong majorities favor his proposals for small business tax cuts and infrastructure investments. Nonetheless, “two-thirds of Americans from broad majorities across party lines are doubtful that Congressional Democrats and Republicans will be able to reach an agreement on a job-creation package.”

Obama has staked out a strong position but Republicans will do everything they can to deny him a win. That’s the nature of politics in 2011. Bad news for an economy that’s been shattered by thirty years of misguided Republican policy.

Bob Burnett is a Berkeley writer. He can be reached at bburnett@sonic.net

Nearly two-thirds of Americans age 70+ have hearing loss. According to a study led by Johns Hopkins and National Institute on Aging researchers, persons of the black race seem to have a protective effect against this loss. And older or male subjects were more likely to have hearing loss or more severe hearing loss than younger or female subjects. It is believed to be the first nationally representative survey of older adults on this often ignored and under-reported condition. Past studies have strongly linked hearing loss to such other health problems as cognitive decline, dementia, and poorer physical function. . Relatively little is known about risk factors that drive hearing loss. [Feb. 28, 2011 Journal of Gerontology: Medical Sciences]

Tinnitus in the elderly is prevalent and impacts quality of life. According to another research, it is associated with such treatable health conditions as otitis media, rhinosinusitis, head injury, and hypertension. Nearly 36 million Americans suffer from tinnitus or head noises. It may be an intermittent sound or an annoying continuous sound in one or both ears. These researchers found a significant difference between the prevalence of tinnitus among "young elderly" subjects aged 65-69 (6.5%), and the older (80+ years) group (41.9 %). [October 2010 Otolaryngology – Head and Neck Surgery.] the September 17 San Francisco Chronicle carries an encouraging report of a tinnitus discovery that could lead to new ways to stop the ringing.

Despite the overwhelming number of older adults with hearing loss, only one-fifth use hearing aids. And only 3 percent of those with mild hearing loss take advantage of these devices.

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In 1932 The Man Who Played God was advertised as “a modern drama from real life.” George Arliss played Montgomery Royale, a concert pianist when a bomb explosion ends his career. He moves to New York with his sister, fiancée (played by Bette Davis), and a close friend. After abandoning thoughts of suicide, he discovers he can lipread. He spends his days observing people in the park from his apartment across the street. He learns of their problems, tries to help them anonymously, and becomes absorbed in his playing God game. I cried during the part where he supposedly lipreads a conversation during which fiancée tells some man that she loves him but cannot leave Montgomery because of his handicap. Montgomery ends their engagement, allowing her to follow her heart.

In 1955 Hollywood did it again, this time with fewer implausible ingredients. Sincerely Yours starred Liberace as Tony Warrin – popular pianist who plays any style and has money, great clothes, penthouse overlooking Central Park, rich blond fiancée, loyal brunette secretary secretly in love with him, and a date at Carnegie Hall. On concert night, disease deafens him. He learns lipreading and, using high-powered binoculars, eavesdrops on conversations across the street in the park. When he finds people in need, he intercedes with aid. Fiancée falls in love with another man, secretary quits, doctors give him new hope. Da-dah.

Lipreading is watching the lips to extract whatever speech information one can, whereas speechreading is watching the lips, tongue, teeth, cheeks, eyes, facial expressions, gestures, body language and anything else that gives clues as to what the other person is saying. Thus, speechreading encompasses lipreading and a lot more.

To appreciate how difficult lipreading is and how much of the articulation of normal speech is not visible to an observer, it helps to watch an online video of a person speaking, “Human Articulators in Action.” (Simply Google that title.) When a normal person speaks, the tongue moves in at least 3 locations (tip, middle and back), and the soft palate rises and falls. All of these articulatory gestures are phonetically significant, changing the speech sound produced in important ways, but they are invisible to the lipreader.

It has been estimated that only 30% to 40% of sounds in the English language are distinguishable in most English dialects from sight alone. The phrase "where there's life, there's hope" appears identical to "where's the lavender soap."

Chicago Sun-Times editor and critic Henry Kisor, following meningitis as a child, became totally deaf. His autobiography title, What's That Pig Outdoors?: A Memoir of Deafness, references mis-hearing the question, "What's that big loud noise?" He uses this example to discuss the shortcomings of speechreading. “The term ‘lipreading’ itself is technically a misnomer, for the act involve much more than merely watching movements of the lips… Broken into its components, lipreading seems an almost impossible circus trick, like juggling Indian clubs while spinning a dinner plate on one’s forehead.”

Exaggerated mouthing of words is not helpful and may in fact obscure useful clues when conversing with a speechreader. Other difficulties may include: lack of a clear view of the speaker's lips, moustaches or hands in front of the mouth, the speaker's head turned aside or away, a bright light source such as a window behind the speaker, and group discussions, especially when multiple people are talking in quick succession.

There’s good news. People who play music all their lives, even as a hobby, suffer less hearing loss as they age than do nonmusicians. A new study reports that, while being a musician does not give a person super hearing, it does offer a protective benefit against cognitive decline in processing sounds. According to Universite de Montreal research fellow Benjamin Rich Zendel, “The age-related changes in auditory processing decline at a slower rate in musicians compared to nonmusicians,.. Think of the catch phrase ‘use it or lose it.’ They use their hearing at a much higher level than the average person.” The average musician at age 70 was able to understand speech in a noisy environment as well as an average 50-year-old non-musician.

Depending on the degree of hearing loss, a person may be deemed hearing impaired, even disabled. A related condition is loss of balance, which can involve falling. Bathrooms are one of the most fall-prone spaces. Slippery floors, especially polished wood (as in Alta Bates Hospital and the new North Berkeley Walgreens) are also problematic. Likewise any senior/disabled housing lacking corridor railings on both sides of every floor! Friday, September 23 is National Falls Prevention Awareness Day.

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RESOURCES

‘Not a day goes by…’ declares lyricist Stephen Sondheim. And it’s how I feel about my California Telephone! The Deaf & Disabled Telecommunication Program is a lifesaver. When I began to lose my hearing, the audiologist handed me a signed form validating my condition and listing locations where I could get one of these gems as well as instruction in its use. Piece of cake.

If you need an amplified phone, TTY, or other specialized telephone for your personal use, you can initiate the free and easy application process yourself. Go to ddtp.cpuc.ca.gov/ and print out an application form. Or, if you’re not into computers, request a certification form by mail or phone in your language by writing/phoning the State of California CTAP Contact Center at P.O. Box 30310 in Stockton, CA 95213 or 1-800-806-1191. Spanish: 1-800-949-5650; TTY: 1-800-806-4474; Mandarin: 1-866-324-8747, etc. etc.

Part of this process requires the signature of one of several types of professionals authorized by the State of California. Licensed physicians, including Veterans Administration physicians, may sign for people with any disability. Clinical audiologists may sign for people who are deaf or hard of hearing. If you don’t have an audiologist or otolaryngologist (ear-nose-throat M.D.) on the string, initiate this process yourself. On Friday, September 23 at 11 A.M., there will be a free California Telephone Access program at South Berkeley Senior Center, 2939 Ellis Street (corner of Ashby), Berkeley. 510- 981-5170. (Phone to confirm.)

The Alameda County Area Agency on Aging (AAA) periodically conducts a survey to document current needs, concerns and resources within the County’s age 55+ population. The survey helps the AAA identify and provide support for senior services in Alameda County. If you are age 55+ and live in Alameda County, take a few moments to complete the survey that is available online (Google ‘Alameda County Senior Needs Assessment’), OR inquire at your senior center.

MARK YOUR CALENDAR: September and October 2011. Call to confirm, date, time and place. Readers are welcome to share news of events that may interest boomers and seniors. Daytime, free, and Bay Area events preferred. pen136@dslextreme.com

Monday, Sept. 26. 7 P.M. Kensington Library, 61 ArlingtonAve. The Elegance of the Hedgehog by Muriel Barbery. Each meeting starts with a poem selected and read by a member with brief discussion following. New members welcome. 510-524-3043.

Designed for motorists who are 50+, taught in one-day. To be eligible, you must have taken the standard course within the last 4 years. Preregistration required. $12 per person fee for AARP members; $14 per person fee

Marilyn Ababio and Dorothy Ridley, POLST representatives inform about POLST, a form that spells out the medical treatment you desire during the end of your life + question and answer period. MastickSenior Center, 1155 Santa Clara Avenue, Alameda. 510-747-7506.

Tuesday, Oct. 25. 3 - 4 P.M. Tea and Cookies. Central Berkeley Public Library. A book club for people who want to share the books they have read. Central Berkeley Public Library. 2090 Kittredge. 510-981-6100.

The truism: “life is what happens while you’re waiting,” is very applicable to people who are struggling to recover from mental illness. Frequently, people are unhappy because they believe they should not be happy. A lot of people believe that before they can be happy they need to fix their perceived adverse life circumstances. This is not always true. This partial erroneous belief is present in the minds of people at large and not just those who have a mental illness. Abe Lincoln said: “Most people are about as happy as they make up their mind to be.”

Persons with mental illness are more of a work in progress than most people. We need to enjoy the journey because, for one thing, it could end at any moment. A person can go through their life without succeeding at what they set out to accomplish, and that has to be acceptable. Living in a boarding house, which is the fate of many persons with a mental illness (also known as a board and care), certainly doesn’t seem like much of a life. Yet, even such a possibly miserable existence can have happy moments, such as a visit to the library, going out to get a cup of coffee, or spending time with another mentally ill person. Whatever someone’s circumstances are, no where is a law written that a person must be miserable at all times.

An important step could be to acknowledge a source of misery and how one is being affected by it. For example, someone could say: “I am unhappy because I don’t have a job,” or “I am working in a low level job and I know that I am capable of much more…” And then once the offending life circumstance gets acknowledged, a person can set it aside mentally and choose to be happy about other things in life that are going well. For example: “I have a date for Friday night and I’m not going to think about my dumb job.”

The above examples don’t follow a Buddhist model of non attachment in which a person is not supposed to get upset about anything. Instead, I am giving weight to life circumstances as possible real sources of misery. In the absence of hope, any attempt at happiness could be merely escapism. Becoming a student, a volunteer, or even a hobbyist, not to mention getting employment, are all ways to creating hope in one’s life. It is not necessarily important that one succeeds at the things one tries, as long as one keeps trying. You could have a dozen failures in a row at the things you’re trying to do, but this is better than sitting around and drinking beer while gossiping with your buddies all day. One route may or may not lead to something, while the route of sitting around definitely leads nowhere.

Aside from a person not creating something to look forward to, lack of happiness can often be attributed to negative and self-critical thinking. If you are already engaged in some type of meaningful activity, and yet you are still unhappy most of the time, it might be a case of being persecuted by your own thoughts. A person can also naturally be unhappy due to tragedies or problems in life. One hopes this type of unhappiness is temporary and goes away when the crisis is solved. It is not reasonable to expect yourself not to have a reaction to events in life. The ones that I have heard espousing non reactivity to life circumstances were in a cult; their techniques delivered cultism but did not deliver the state of bliss that was promised.

Concerning unhappiness due to negative thinking patterns, it might be good to explore the thinking with a written exercise. If you can identify the exact thoughts that are inflicting pain on you, you can then dismiss those thoughts individually. The more specific you are the better are your chances for getting such a release.

Again, sometimes we may feel that we are not “allowed” to be happy because of not meeting some standard in life, such as a level of financial security that we perceive is adequate, or the perception of an adequate social life. Or we might disallow our own happiness because of thinking we are overweight, or thinking that we don’t have abdominal muscles that are good enough. The mind can invent any reason why we should not be happy. When we grant permission to ourselves to be happy, it can be like a giant relief.

Being unhappy is sometimes an indicator that medication is needed to correct a problem in the brain that is causing pain directly. Also, unhappiness can be caused by a disturbing environment, such as if you live among people who fight. It can be caused by not heading in a positive direction in life. And it can be caused by negative thoughts. Each of these categories should be addressed in the quest for feeling better.

“A new phase is starting…we have reached an important point when the end begins to come into view…there is a light at the end of the tunnel.”

--Gen. William Westmoreland, commander U.S. forces in Vietnam, November 1967

“Yesterday’s attack [in Kabul] was a fleeting event; it came and it went. The insurgents are on the defensive.” The performance of Afghan security forces should tell Afghans “they can sleep well at night.”

Dear Lord, what is about generals that seem to make them so particularly immune to history’s lessons?

Gen. Navarre had a sure-fire plan to draw the Vietnamese insurgents into a great battle that would end the war. Worked like a charm. On May 7, 1954 the French army surrendered at Dien Bien Phu.

In November 1967, Gen. Westmoreland was making the rounds in Washington, talking up “body counts” and “pacification,” and how the U.S would have this little matter in Vietnam wrapped up pretty quickly. Ten weeks later, on Jan.31, 1968, the National Liberation Front and the North Vietnamese launched the Tet offensive that put the U.S. Embassy in Saigon under siege, seized the city of Hue, and shattered the myth that the U.S. was winning the war in Vietnam.

And now Gen. Allen says the attack on Kabul indicates the Taliban are on their last legs.

For NATO this year has been the deadliest in the decade-old war, and the Kabul assault suggests that the Taliban are hardly on the ropes. As Matthew Green of the Financial Times put it, “The attack was among the most sophisticated insurgents have launched on the capital and exposed the inability of Afghan forces to guarantee security even in the most heavily defended districts.”

A “fleeting event”? I suppose that depends on how one defines “fleeting.” Seven Taliban pinned down NATO and Afghan security forces for 20 hours, scattering Embassy officials, and pretty much paralyzing a major part of the capital. It was the 26th major attack on Kabul since 2008, assaults that have killed 225 people.

What generals don’t get (it tends to be above their pay grade) is that wars like Vietnam and Afghanistan— wars of occupation—are political, not military affairs. The U.S. military continues to claim that the Tet offensive was a huge military victory because it killed lots of insurgents, and the U.S. took back all the cities it lost. But Tet was less a military offensive than a political undertaking aimed at derailing the myth that the U.S. was “winning” the war in Vietnam. And that is exactly what Tet did. Regardless of what the generals thought, the American people concluded that they had been lied to, and that the war could not be won.

During the Paris peace talks to end the war in Southeast Asia, an American colonel confronted his North Vietnamese counterpart and told him that the U.S. had won every battle in the Vietnam War. The North Vietnamese officer nodded, “Yes, that is true, but also irrelevant.” I doubt the American officer got the point.

General Allen’s line about “the insurgents are on the defensive” can now join former Vice-President Dick Cheney’s dismissal of the growing Iraqi insurgency as nothing but Saddam Hussein “dead-enders.”

As for Kabul residents being able to “sleep well at night” because of the performance of the Afghan security forces:

“The nature and scale of today’s attacks clearly proves that the terrorists received assistance and guidance from some security officials within the government who are their sympathizers,” Naim Hamidzai, chair of the Afghan parliament’s Internal Security Committee, told the New York Times. “Otherwise it would be impossible for the planners and masterminds of the attack to stage such a sophisticated and complex attack, in this extremely well guarded location without the complicity of insiders.”

The Afghan Army saw its desertion rate more than double in the first six months of this year. Between January and June, some 24,590 soldiers deserted, compared with 11,423 who left in the same period in 2010. The Afghan army is supposed to reach 195,000 by October 2012.

The Afghan army has also been unable to recruit Pashtuns from southern Afghanistan, the heart of the insurgency. According to a recent study by the New York Times, Pashtuns from Kandahar, Helmand, Oruzgan, Zabul, Paktika, and Ghazni make up 17 percent of the population but only 1.5 percent of the army. In short, the Afghan Army in the south is essentially a northern army of occupation, which explains why no one in the southern provinces will join the army, and virtually no Taliban have switched allegiances to the government.

To shore up security, the U.S. has been recruiting and arming militias that, according to a recent Human Rights study, have killed, raped and stolen from local villagers. U.S. Special Forces recruit the militia members, who then shift their loyalties to local warlords. This should hardly come as a surprise. The Soviets tried exactly this tactic during their occupation, which ended up fueling the growth of the warlords and led to the devastating 1992-96 civil war.

Of course General Allen might have had something else in mind when he talked about getting a good night’s sleep.

According to the United Nations, this year will be a bumper crop for opium. Prices for dry opium increased 306 percent this year, from $69 a kilo to $281 a kilo. As Jean-Luc Lemahieu, an official of the UN Office of Drugs and Crime, told the New York Times, “This is not business as usual. There is no crop that can compete with those prices.”

Smoke enough opium you can sleep through anything.

For the last 10 years we have bombed, shot, incarcerated, and water-boarded a lot of people in Afghanistan. We have allowed opium to become the country’s major source of income, and we are currently bringing back the warlords and their armies. Afghanistan is a far more dangerous place today than it was a decade ago, and the only tunnels are the ones in which the Taliban store their weapons and supplies.

It seems time to resuscitate a line from another decade and another war: “Out now!”

Arts & Events

Golden Thread Productions is one of the important Bay Area theater companies that has a very specific mission--to explore the culture and identity, or identities, of Middle Easterners and Middle Eastern Americans. For the past decade and a half, since Torange Yeghiazarian founded the troupe, Golden Thread's brought plays from and about the Middle East in all its diversity to stages throughout the Bay Area, including its annual ReOrient festival of short plays, as well as storytelling shows to schoolchildren.

Night Over Erzinga, the premiere of a new play at the South Side Theatre (Magic Theatre, Fort Mason) in San Francisco by Adriana Sevahn Nichols about refugees from the Armenian genocide coming to America and what they and their descendants face, by both remembering and forgetting the past, is the first event in a collaborative National New Plays Initiative between Golden Thread, Silk Road Theatre Project (Chicago) and the Lark Play Development Center (New York), Middle East America.

This is in many ways an exemplary production, bringing out the best in an ambitious, sometimes problematic script. The first part deals with refugees trying to bury the past in an effort to create a future for themselves, a dream on the terms of the society they've fled to, and the emotional price, the cultural emptiness their self-repression begets. The second part follows--at first in a way almost like a satiric burlesque of the first part--the American-born daughter of the Armenian couple who met in Massachusetts in the first part, who's fled the last vestige of her family and cultural identity to perform as a dancer, marrying a Latino, another refugee coming from a more traditional, family-oriented culture. The action is never quite chronological, following instead the logic of dreams, memory, simple association from time to time.

There's deft role-switching by all the actors, Trybom and Tanner in particular, to portray three generations and more of uprootedness and striving for a new life, a new identity. The story touches on hardship and the atrocities of the past mainly through stories that finally get told and the evidence of emotional and mental turmoil, from unexamined habits that determine a life and its attitudes to the delusions of mental collapse.

The play ends with a dreamlike scene around a wishing tree--a good alternate title!--its branches tied with cloths signifying wishes. On opening night, Yeghiazarian unveiled a commissioned Tree Of Life, to honor ancestors and future generations, by Bay Area artist Thomas Sepe that will remain in the lobby through the run of the show, to which audiences may tie their wishes.

The production is one of the most lucid I've seen recently on a Bay Area stage. Karmali--himself a muslim of the Aga Khan's sect--and his players of various backgrounds illuminate the refugees' experience, show their inner lives and point to both the difference of cultural origins and the improvisatory experiment of American assimilation, revealing good and bad in the roots and in the results ... A triumph of live theater in bringing out inner strengths and transforming occasional awkwardnesses in the play, creating unforgettable dramatic--and, yes, comic--images of immigrant heritage, of our common heritage.

Rita Moreno, nee Rosita Dolores Alverio--one of the few performers, and the first Latino, to win Oscar, Tony, Grammy and (2) Emmy(s)--has lived in the Bay Area the past two decades, distinguishing herself locally with her very public presence. At Berkeley Rep just a few years ago, Moreno did a splendid turn as Amanda in Tennessee Williams' Glass Menagerie.

She's back onstage at the Rep, telling of her life and career and performing scenes from both, in Rita Moreno: Life Without Makeup, a show concocted by her and Tony Taccone, artistic director of the Rep, staged and directed by David Galligan.

Moreno's story is particularly interesting as the roles she played onstage and screen relate to both her Puerto Rican origins and her efforts not to be merely typecast as an exotic of whatever kind.

(On the other hand, one of the production numbers--choreographed by Lee Martino, featuring the excellent dancing of Ray Garcia and Salvatore Vassallo with Moreno--from Terence McNally's The Ritz shows how Moreno could turn that problem on its head, her character hilariously concocted of Latina malapropisms imitated from a relative.)

There's the not-always triumphal parade of the movies she appeared in, notably The King & I, Singin' In The Rain, Summer and Smoke, Night of the Following Day, Carnal Knowledge and of course West Side Story. There're film clips projected, and her years on TV with The Electric Company are represented on projected video as well as in a funny song-and-dance routine in a big wig and dress, playing the part of a naughty little girl from that groundbreaking kids' show.

Moreno's a trouper in life, as well as the performing arts, offering some tart anecdotes, including her "emotional sinkhole" of an affair with Marlon Brando (followed by a suicide attempt), as well as the tale of the first date with her future husband of 45 years, Leonard Gordon. Not finding her in the lobby of the theater she told him to meet her at, Gordon noticed her name on the marquee as he was leaving, rushed backstage to her dressing room and gasped out: "You're THE Rita Moreno?" (Gordon, long her manager, died only last year.)

Her presence onstage throughout makes the two-hour show, which isn't the star vehicle some have claimed. There are some fine vignettes, mostly production numbers that reprise moments from her career, West Side Story naturally saved for last. But too much of the burden falls on her shoulders. Instead of bringing her personality and talents into the spotlight, accenting both her excellence and her humanity, Without Makeup reduces Moreno's natural dynamism onstage by lessening the concentration of the material--too much exposition, worthy of an interview or talk show, but not a stage production highlighting her life and talents.

In the background, there could be the shadow of another, very successful star vehicle, Elaine Stritch at Liberty ... in which a raconteur's style flowed seamlessly in and out of songs and dance numbers, staged in a cabaret setting. Moreno's a good talker, by turns affecting, funny and pithy, but her own style of relating to an audience and performing doesn't really catch in this kind of staging on the Roda Stage of the Rep, despite her sincere yet very professional gestures to both informality and spectacle.

Certainly this production will be reworked, especially if it's taken elsewhere. At the moment, however glorious it is to witness Moreno's ageless charisma as a performer and her character as a person, Without Makeup is more like an extended tribute, the kind most stars walk through, bantering cutely for the audience. But Moreno's really working, putting herself out. The theatrical fashioning, the staging of this intrinsically interesting material--her life and career--should be more suited to her exceptional strengths, her extraordinary talent.

"It's showtime!" declares the young waitress polishing a wine glass. "The restaurant is a theater. The meal's a play. And I'm the actress!"

Kate Jopson essays the tour de force monologue, "The Waitress Who Read Proust," tart and funny, to open the quartet of plays by playwright (and director) James Keller, Remember the Ladies, last weekend at the Unitarian Fellowship on Cedar--and one performance coming up Tuesday, October 25 at Live Oak Theater for Actors Ensemble of Berkeley's staged reading series.

That's the genius of Poor Players--with just the actors, the play itself and a minimum of means (mostly footlights and a few props: a table, a few chairs, a glass or two ... hats and scarves for costume changes), Keller's troupe makes real, live theater, almost anywhere for its stage, maybe the more satisfying for the spareness, its "back to basics" approach.

The sparsity of effects helps create the real effect: by focusing our senses on the main course, we find ourselves more engrossed than with the appetizers.

The shorter ensemble pieces that follow "The Waitress ... "--"That's My Chair" and "A Lifetime in Madrid"--are, respectively, almost burlesque and touchingly melancholic; the first has adult education classmates Elinor Bell, Martha Luehrman and Anne Hallinan squabbling like kids over who sits where (and more substantial issues), while the second, with the same players, narrated by Kate Jopson, act out a stylized time lapse of the lifetime of three old friends.

"All At Sea," aptly titled, has Anne Hallinan and Martha Luehrman as an impromtu shipboard comedy team--Mesdames Prendergast and Teasdale, straight from suburban vaudeville--the second a straightlaced belle as straight-lady ingenue, the first as a long-winded, hard drinking comedienne, belting back screwdrivers in a deckchair as she favors her neighbor in the sun with the spiel of her senior adventures ... both play their cards handily, as does the author, drawing in a third, Janice Fuller Leone in a good turn, poking her nose in as the cruise's busybody.

From a monologue by a worldly wise "entertainment-style" waitress from French Creek, California, to a three-sided glimpse inside the indolent clientele of the luxury racket of cruises--Poor Players serves up a savvy feast of people-watching, something to laugh about, something to wonder over.

--Inga Swearingen, first known as a regular on Prairie Home Companion, whose unusual combination of musical influences--from opera, jazz and choral music to Bossa Nova, North Indian music and Swedish and American folksongs--has resulted in her melodic "Swedish Farm Jazz" on a trio of albums, most recently "First Rain." Inga has performed with critical acclaim several times over the past few years at the Freight & Salvage, the JazzSchool, Peralta loft concerts and at local Jazz Vespers. (A clip from one of her Freight shows is at: ingaswearingen.com )

The Aurora Theatre, in its commitment to a theatre of ideas and the eloquence in drama that explores them, has selected A DELICATE BALANCE by Edward Albee.

When we pass sixty years, the darkness we always sensed was there begins to loom larger. Since Shakespeare, Edward Albee seems to best plumb the human condition and that particular darkness as we enter the twilight. The Aurora knows its audience:

I counted only half a dozen attendees under 50 years old. Written 45 years ago, the play is perhaps more relevant today as Boomers enter their seniority.

As in all his plays, Albee creates characters who can believably articulate our complexity with an enthralling fugue of words.

Director Tom Ross has convened a coterie of the better actors in our midst to give life to this soul-stirring drama. He guides them through the changing rhythms of the play masterfully, and his staging and the actors’ superb techniques aid us in the challenge to keep up with the onslaught of ideas and emotions.

As the web of relationships is spun out for us and sorted out by the characters, there are quips that in the writing and the delivery bring seizures of honest laughter from the audience. The humor is witty, insightful, and a relief from the electric tension and internal upheavals we go through with our new-found acquaintances.

It’s about those upper-class folks who have servants and display half a wall devoted to decanted booze and lovely glasses. They drink a lot. There is the abiding metaphor that they let they their bottled-up spirits flow free. (For good reason was the original drama done to honor the great Greek god of getting drunk.)

Tobias and Agnes, the householders, begin the tale. Wife Agnes (Kimberly King) is one of those people who perform for you rather than converse with you, but her rants are so eloquent, her diction and inflection so perfect, that one can only play the straight man and protect oneself against her assaults, as we sense stolid husband Tobias (Ken Grantham) has done for years. Agnes’s introductory monologue is about her concern of devolving into madness; with synapses that fire that rapidly, one can see how the cerebral machinery could get overloaded and collapse.

Enter her live-in dipsomaniac sister, Claire (Jamie Jones), her opposite: easy-going, sprawling on the floor and talking casually of sex in summers past, she has the same articulation genes as Sis, but without the stick up her ass, and functions as the outsider, giving a play-by-play philosophical and psychological deconstruction of the motives and actions of the other characters—while continuously deceiving herself.

The news is that the domestic equation will soon be unbalanced by the return of thirty-something daughter Julia seeking refuge from her fourth failed marriage.

Then the trademark Albee strangeness is introduced. Long-time friends (Anne Darragh and Charles Dean) stop by for an unusual, unannounced visit. The drawing room drama mode is broken with their tearful, fearful breakdown.

After intermission number one, the action takes off with the advent of Julia (Carrie Paff) with the eruptions that children and parents bring out in one another.

The convention of two intermissions is respected. Nobody left. Due to the intensity, one is moved to duck across the Addison to the Revival for a quick top-shelf Bourbon then rush back for more.

There is something special about this contingent of actors who have spent a lifetime mastering their craft and have acted together. In ensemble and individual performance, this all-Equity cast is as professional and near perfect as I can imagine in casting and ability. (For those not familiar with my reviews, I always find some fault, but not here.)

Their environment is appealing and believable in the set by Richard Olmsted, a fellow Carnegie Mellon alum who heads the tech theatre department at CSU East Bay and often designs at Aurora.

As you walk to your seat, you have the urge to plop into the comfortable leather chair onstage. It is an arrangement for conversation without a television in sight. I’ve been in homes like this and the life of the mind is their boon and their bane. Those who think too much are dangerous—mainly to themselves. As Agnes comments, “We all manufacture our own despair.” The furniture is rich, well-used and muted in color, with a raised level at the top of the stage with a bookcase of colorful spines and designed wallpaper against a bay window; that window looks out on an autumnal tree, the lighting on which tells us the season and time of day seasonal as well as the emotional temperature change inside.

The subtle colors and fabrics of the costumes by Callie Floor enhance our visual enjoyment, are just right for their class, character and status, and invite us to imagine ourselves in the clothing.

Inside Skinny: Mr. Albee attended the opening. After the play, one of the actors regaled me with a story of Albee interrupting the conversation at the reception with an inspiration: “I want to change a line! Have Tobias say, “The Republicans are being ‘brutal.’“ Albee is known for his abiding enmity of the GOP.

As the press release describes: “Albee’s 25 plays form a body of work that Albee himself describes as ‘an examination of the American Scene, an attack on the substitution of artificial for real values in our society, a condemnation of complacency, cruelty, and emasculation and vacuity, a stand against the fiction that everything in this slipping land of ours is peachy-keen.’”

A DELICATE BALANCE originally starred Hume Cronyn and Jessica Tandy, and won the Pulitzer in 1967, as well as the Tony for Best Revival in 1996.

The Aurora production has already been extended through October 16 which indicates a sell-out.

It is one of those theatre experiences we always hope for and too seldom get; though the Aurora has delivered much more often than not in their twenty years. This is one will be remembered, and it has my unqualified recommendation.

Ah, yes, "the days grow short when you reach September" (Kurt Weill's beautiful "September Song", sung by Walter Huston in 1938.) So, while one "doesn't have time for the waiting game", we're happy to say that this September and October offers several memorable and very enjoyable events, as listed below:

Berkeley's very own Rita Moreno, that 79 year old Puerto Rican dynamo with the spiked hair, is dancing up a storm and baring her soul in her one-woman show: "Rita Moreno: Life Without Makeup" at the Berkeley Repertory Theatre through October 30. Tickets $14.50 - $73/00. BerkeleyRep.Org.

Cal Performances is offering a "Free for All" Concert on Sunday, September 25, 11 a.m. - 6 p.m. on five stages on the Berkeley campus, featuring over 20 different artists. (510) 642-9988.

San Francisco Cocktail Week, September 1-25, Tessera Gallery, 1225 7th St. (a block from West Oakland Bart Station). Ten of the East Bay's Best Bartenders "round 'em up and face off" at the East Bay Showdown. (sfcocktailweek.com)

The architects Diller Scofidio + Renfro have unveiled their design for the Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive (BAM/PFA) on Oxford Street between Center and Addison. They were required to keep the old UC Printing Plant, and they have added a blob-shaped building coated with zinc.

The new addition is in the avant-gardist style that has been typical of museums since Frank Gehry’s Guggenheim Museum opened in Bilbao in 1997. The Guggenheim looks like abstract art of the 1920s and is coated with titanium. It does not work very well as a museum - some visitors say it gives them vertigo - but it was so new, so different, and so shiny that it drew large numbers of gaping tourists to Bilbao.

Avant-garde architects are like teenagers who dye their hair purple to be different from everyone else, who consider themselves very original but obviously are just imitating the cool kids in their clique. Likewise, the designers of BAM/PFA consider its zinc facade very original but obviously are just imitating Gehry’s titanium.

The inept urbanism of BAM/PFA is much worse than its flashy “blobitecture.” Because the goal is to create a sculptural icon, this sort of design focuses on itself and ignores its urban context.

On Center Street, BAM/PFA has a restaurant on the second floor that cantilevers out over the sidewalk. The south side of Center Street is very attractive because of the sidewalk seating in front of its restaurants, but the north side of the street, where the museum is, currently has very little street life.

The museum could have added to the vitality of the street by having cafe seating on the sidewalk, but instead it put the cafe on the second floor, where it is cut off from the street life.

Why did the architects do this? Renfro explains, "Everyone has a sidewalk cafe. We wanted an over-sidewalk cafe." In other words, he did it to be different, like the teenager who thinks, "Everyone has brown hair. I want purple hair."

On Addison Street, the design does much worse damage. Currently, very few people walk on this block of Addison. The west half of the block has a few underused or vacant storefronts. The east half of the block has the delivery area of a faceless office building on one side and a small parking structure on the other side, which do not attract pedestrians to walk up the street.

The Pacific Film archive will replace this parking structure, and it could have been designed to encourage people to walk up Addison Street. Instead, the only entrance to both the museum and the Film Archive will be on Center Street. No one will walk up Addison Street to the Film Archive: If they did, they would have to double back on Center Street to get to the entrance.

The Film Archive's facade on Addison Street will be set back behind a lawn, will have no windows or doors, and will have a large video screen. The architect's drawing shows a crowd of people standing here and watching videos. In reality, very few people will walk on this street, and the video screen will not even be visible to people looking up the street from Shattuck.

It is easy to predict what will happen to this space. In downtown Berkeley, if you design a dead space where no one walks, add a lawn where people can spread out, have no windows so there are no eyes on the street, and even add a video screen to provide entertainment for people with nothing to do, you have designed a perfect invitation to create a homeless encampment.

Good urbanism demands that the Pacific Film Archive should have a separate entrance at the corner of Addison and Oxford Streets, to attract people to walk up Addison Street and make that street livelier and more successful economically.

Ideally, this entrance should have a sign like the signs used in old Art Deco movie theaters, extending beyond the building line, so everyone looking up Addison knows it is a move theater. This sign would make it easier for people to find the theater when they come there for the first time, and it would connect this block visually with the arts district one block west on Addison Street.

Of course, there is no chance that an avant-gardist would use this sort of common-sense traditional design for signage. This sort of conventional iconography makes buildings more legible to the public, but to communicate in this way, you have to use conventions rather than being totally new and different - which is as bad as having conventional brown hair instead of purple hair.

At least, we should insist that the Film Archive have a separate entrance on Addison Street and a facade on that street that is closer to the sidewalk, so it is more visible. That minor redesign would attract large numbers of people to walk on this block of Addison Street, making it more vital and more successful, rather than giving this block a dead space and lawn that will only attract the homeless.